Bank Mellat Traded All Session at a Single Price of 1,199 Rials as 1.14 Billion Shares Sat Unfilled in the Buy Queue (Monday, 3 August 2026)

On Monday, 3 August 2026 (12 Mordad 1405), the board for Bank Mellat, which trades on the Tehran Stock Exchange under the symbol Vabmellat, recorded five numbers that were all the same: first trade of the day 1,199 rials, session low 1,199 rials, session high 1,199 rials, last trade 1,199 rials, closing price 1,199 rials. Iran's largest listed bank went through a full session, 10,418 separate trades and 5,179,357,680 shares changing hands, without printing a single trade at any other price.

At the end of that session, 1,138,716,770 shares of demand were still queued in 2,107 orders at that same 1,199 rials, and the supply side of the order book was empty at all five best levels. That is a buy queue. The stock rose 2.92 percent on the day and was, for a large share of the people who wanted it, effectively unbuyable.

Background: how a queue forms

The Tehran Stock Exchange sets a permitted price range for every symbol in every session. For Bank Mellat that day, against a previous close of 1,165 rials, the range ran from 1,131 to 1,199 rials, roughly three percent in either direction. No order outside that range can be entered.

When demand exceeds supply, the price rises until it reaches the top of the range. Up to that point the market is doing its job. From the moment the price touches the ceiling, however, the adjustment mechanism stops: the price can no longer rise to tempt a seller out. Excess demand has nowhere to go, so it stacks up in a queue at that one number and waits its turn. A queue is what happens when demand meets a ceiling, not what happens when enthusiasm alone runs high.

One technical point matters here, because most shareholders attribute a locked symbol to base volume (hajm-e mabna, the minimum turnover a stock must reach for its closing price to register the full day's move). On that day, Bank Mellat's base volume was set at 1 share. The base-volume brake was wide open and played no part in this. What locked the stock was the price band. Our separate report on the gap between closing price and last trade covers the base-volume mechanism in detail; see our recent Tehran Stock Exchange coverage.

The day's numbers

The table below sets two locked symbols side by side on that same day, Monday, 3 August 2026. The figures come from the order book and the trading-system board for that session, and all prices are in rials.

Two companies of completely different size, a bank with a market capitalisation of roughly 405 trillion tomans and a small industrial manufacturer, showing one identical pattern: session low and high at a single number, zero supply, and a queue that never cleared. Bank Mellat's turnover that day was 621 billion tomans; Pashmshishe Iran's was 14 billion tomans. Daily prices are tracked on our stock market prices page.

To gauge how unusual that session was, line up the six that preceded it. Bank Mellat's actual trading range in those sessions ran between 12 and 46 rials: 1,154 to 1,166 on 2 August, 1,116 to 1,156 on 1 August, 1,130 to 1,165 on 29 July and 1,175 to 1,215 on 26 July. On 3 August the range was zero. The trade count tells the same story from another angle: 10,418 trades against 18,950 the previous session, 35,787 on 29 July and 45,279 on 26 July. The least-traded of the symbol's last seven sessions was precisely the one that posted its largest price gain.

Quoted price versus realised price

For Bank Mellat, 1,199 rials is a real price in the sense that 5.18 billion shares genuinely changed hands behind it. For someone standing in the queue, though, the same number means something else entirely: a price at which they did not transact, with no way of knowing what price they will transact at tomorrow.

The difference shows up in portfolio valuation. Every shareholder's holdings are marked at the closing price, and the TEDPIX main index is built on the same basis. When a symbol is locked at its ceiling, that value is a paper value until the queue clears. The shareholder sees a green number, but converting it to cash depends on someone being willing to buy in that neighbourhood the next day.

One figure captures the contradiction precisely. Bank Mellat's average daily volume is 6,240,642,999 shares; its volume that day was 5,179,357,680 shares, about 83 percent of its own average. The stock's greenest recent session was thinner than its ordinary one. This is the hidden cost of illiquidity, the subject of our liquidity lesson, showing up on an exchange board rather than in a property sale.

Drivers: where the supply came from

The entire net supply came from institutions. In Bank Mellat, retail (haghighi) accounts bought 3,821,075,358 shares and sold 641,994,344, a net 3,179,081,014 shares moving into retail portfolios. On the other side, institutional (hoghooghi) accounts sold 4,537,363,336 shares and bought 1,358,282,322, exactly the same net amount leaving their books.

The two sides were numerically lopsided. That institutional selling came from just 12 trading codes, against 1,258 retail codes on the buy side. Put plainly, the only reason any trading happened in this symbol at all was that a handful of large sellers were willing to supply stock at the ceiling. Without that supply, turnover would have been near zero instead of 5.18 billion shares.

The queue never cleared. Bank Mellat's last trade printed at 12:29:55, five seconds before the session closed, with the queue still full. Pashmshishe Iran stopped even earlier: its last trade was at 12:16:46, and not a single share changed hands in the final thirteen minutes.

The sell queue is the same problem mirrored

What appeared in the buy queue that day repeats in the sell queue with the sign reversed and heavier consequences. In a sell queue the price locks at the floor of the band, the demand side is empty, and a shareholder who wants out cannot get out. The important asymmetry: someone stuck in a buy queue has merely missed an opportunity, while someone stuck in a sell queue watches the value of an asset fall with no mechanism available to stop it.

In both cases the board does the same thing: it displays a price that was out of reach for part of the market. Why shareholders tend to make their worst decisions at exactly these points is the subject of a separate report in our behavioural finance coverage.

Three ratios that measure queue thickness

A queue can be read with three simple ratios, all computable from that day's data:

• Queue volume against traded volume. Bank Mellat: 1,138,716,770 shares queued against 5,179,357,680 traded, about 22 percent. For Pashmshishe Iran the same ratio is 29 percent. The larger it is, the heavier the unfilled pressure.
• When the queue formed. A queue that locks in the opening minutes is not the same animal as one that forms in the final hour. Bank Mellat printed its first trade of the day at the ceiling, meaning it was locked from the outset.
• The multi-day trend in queue thickness. A single day's figure says nothing. What carries meaning is whether the queue is thinning out or thickening across consecutive sessions.

For scale, the average order size in Bank Mellat's queue was roughly 540,000 shares, about 65 million tomans at that day's price. The total value of unfilled orders in the symbol came to roughly 136 billion tomans.

Outlook

What can be said about the next session is a description of mechanics, not a price forecast. The permitted range is redefined against the latest closing price, so the new ceiling sits above the current one. The queue's fate turns on a single variable: how much supply appears at those higher prices. If the sellers are willing to supply at a higher level too, the queue drains and the stock returns to normal trading. If supply does not arrive, the pattern can repeat. Neither outcome can be inferred from one day's data, and this report contains no recommendation to buy or sell any security.

The broader market backdrop that day was supportive: TEDPIX closed up 123,295 points, or 2.39 percent, at 5,277,352 points, and the equal-weight index rose 2.50 percent to 1,497,818 points (as of approximately 16:50 Tehran time on Monday, 3 August 2026). Across the whole market, net shares moving into retail portfolios that day came to 19,154,372,846, more than double the previous session.

Conclusion

Bank Mellat had one price that day and that price was the ceiling of its band; 1.14 billion shares of demand never reached a trade, and the entire net supply came from twelve institutional codes. This matters because a symbol being green and a symbol being tradable are two separate things, and a portfolio value marked against a locked price is unrealised until the queue opens. The one thing to remember: a queued price tells you where the market stopped, not where you could have transacted.

What to watch

• The ratio of queued order volume to traded volume in a given symbol, as a gauge of unfilled pressure.
• When the queue formed, and whether the symbol printed its first trade of the day at the ceiling or the floor.
• Changes in queue thickness across consecutive sessions, the only way to distinguish gradual draining from entrenchment.
• The retail and institutional mix in queued symbols, especially the number of codes supplying against the number demanding.
• The base volume column on the board, currently set at 1 share for exchange-listed symbols and therefore not a factor in this particular lock.
• The gap between closing price and last trade, which collapses to zero in a locked symbol and is itself a queue signal.

This report is a description of market mechanics and published board data only, and contains no buy or sell recommendation.