Lot (Securities Trading)

Rembember the pillar of salt? Lot's wife. Indiana Jones and the melting Nazis? Yeah, it's...not that.

In a financial context, a lot is a fixed quantity of units and defined by the exchange. For stocks, a round lot is a number that can be divided by 100. Odd lots are numbers less than 100, or numbers not divisible by 100. If you were to order a lot in a quantity that combined those two, such as 130, it's a mixed lot.

It would be broken into a round lot of 100, and an odd lot of 30. Exchange-traded securities work with lots of 100. Institutional investors buy debts from bond issuers in large quantities...U.S. government bonds start trading at $1 million. Municipal bonds start smaller, at $100,000. Lesser amounts are known as odd lots.

See: Round Lot. See: Odd Lot.