: Why some big institutions would trade small shares? I noticed that some very big companies would trade only 10 or 15 shares of a company which only got less than 5 USD per share. Why? Update: Here is an example: https://fintel.io/so/us/RPRX

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There are at least three ways the company (e.g. Barclays) could hold stock:

As a Broker for a Customer

Many brokers hold stock 'in street name' (in the name of the firm, rather than in the name of the individual customer). This allows them to do things like borrowing one customers stock to allow another customer to short the company. So if an individual investor bought or sold an 'odd-lot', it would show up like this in the register.
As a Fund for a Customer

They may operate some kind of fund (like a mutual fund) where investors buy and sell pieces of the fund each day. As the fund owns a portfolio of stocks, if one investor adds ,000, they may have to buy a little bit of this, and a little bit of that to ensure the ,000 is full invested.
For their own purposes

They might be doing some house cleaning and realise there are some small positions they want to get rid of, or they have an algorithm hedging some derivative positions that doesn't care about the benefits of trading in 'round lots'. There could be any number of reasons...

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Without knowing the details in the aforementioned example the number 1 reason for small trades is rebalancing.

Imagine a portfolio where 50% of the capital is in tech stocks and the other half in retail stocks. Now go one step into the future (a day, a week, a year, whatever): Your tech stocks might have advanced, say, 60% whereas your retailers, say, lost 20%. The capital is now distributed 2/3 in tech stocks and 1/3 in retailers.

If however you want to maintain the original 50/50 mix, for example because you're an ETF and promised your clients to do so, then now you'd have to sell some of your tech stocks and buy some retailers.

Of course there are various factors how you might end up with an imbalance (e.g. foreign currency exposure, dividends, shocks to volatility). When you're a fund or an ETF there's also the customer side of things: Imagine an additional investor that buys into your fund, say 0.1% of the fund's total volume. They want their cash performing like the rest of the fund so you'd have to buy 0.1% more of every stock you hold, and that might just amount to 15 shares.