Odd lot shares on NEPSE: what to do with the leftover shares after you sell

A reader wrote in last month confused about her Mero Share balance: a 1:20 bonus adjustment had left her with 6 extra units of a bank she'd held for years, on top of her existing 140-share position. Selling the 140 in a normal order was routine. The 6 sat there, untouched, because the regular sell screen in her broker's app kept rejecting the quantity.

That 6-share remainder is an odd lot, and it isn't a bug in her account. It's a distinct order type on NEPSE with its own matching rule, and enough investors hit the same wall every year that it moved over Rs 5 billion in trades in FY 2024/25 alone.

What actually makes a lot "odd"

NEPSE's board lot is set by a scrip's face value under the Securities Trading Regulations, 2075. Almost every company listed on NEPSE, banks, hydropower, insurance, microfinance, carries a Rs 100 face value, and for those the board lot is 10 units. So in the overwhelming majority of cases, an odd lot means 1 to 9 shares.

Because Rs 100 face value dominates the exchange, this post treats "odd lot" as shorthand for "fewer than 10 shares," the case nearly every investor will actually run into.

How you end up holding one

Three ordinary situations create odd lots, and none of them are mistakes on your part:

• A bonus share ratio that doesn't divide evenly. A 1:20 bonus on a 133-share holding mints 6.65 new units. The whole-number part, 6, lands in your account; what happens to the 0.65 fraction depends on the individual company's own notice, and isn't governed by one universal CDSC rule, so it's worth reading the specific bonus announcement rather than assuming.
• Selling part of a round-lot holding. Sell 137 of 140 shares and the 3 left over are, by definition, an odd lot.
• A rights-share adjustment leaves a small residual. Less common than a bonus mismatch, but it happens on the same logic.

IPO allotments themselves rarely cause this. The minimum allotment is 10 units, and any additional units in an oversubscribed lottery also come in multiples of 10, so a clean IPO allotment on its own won't leave you with an odd quantity; it's what happens afterward, through bonus shares or a partial sale, that usually does.

Selling it: the separate Odd Lot order

This is the step that trips people up, because the regular sell screen genuinely won't take a sub-10 quantity for a Rs 100 face-value scrip. Your broker's TMS has a distinct order type, usually labeled "Odd Lot," separate from the Continuous, Pre-Open, and Special Pre-Open sessions used for normal trading.

The mechanics differ from the regular market in one important way: odd-lot orders require an exact match on both price and quantity. The regular market fills your order against the best available price using price-time priority, partial fills included. An odd-lot sell order for 6 units at Rs 450 will only execute against a buy order for exactly 6 units at exactly Rs 450. No partial matching, no automatic price improvement.

In practice, that means:

1. Check NEPSE's public website for the current odd-lot market depth on your scrip, since July 2025 this view is public and separate from the regular order book.
2. Note a bid (or ask, if you're buying) at a price and quantity that matches what you're holding.
3. Key that exact price and quantity into your broker's TMS under the Odd Lot order type.

The one real friction point today is that this website-level visibility hasn't yet been built into TMS itself, so the two systems don't talk to each other. You're effectively cross-referencing a public webpage against your broker's separate trading screen, rather than seeing both in one place. Odd-lot trades also sit inside a tighter ±2% price band around the last traded price, narrower than the regular market's daily circuit, so there isn't much room for a mismatched price to find a buyer anyway.

Why this used to be worse

Odd lot trading in Nepal has improved in visible steps, not all at once.

Before 2017, a broker had to manually flag a sub-10 order, and if that flag was mishandled, the order could fail without the client necessarily knowing why. Moving to daily trading in 2017 removed the Friday bottleneck. The 2022 directive wasn't a rollback; it stopped a specific workaround where shareholders with a full board lot would fragment it into odd-lot pieces, not genuine odd-lot remainders from bonus shares or partial sales.

The market is small trades, not a small market

It's easy to assume odd lots are a marginal curiosity nobody actually trades. The volume says otherwise:

The 2023/24 jump, up 293% on the prior year, roughly tracks a period of heavier NEPSE retail activity generally, since more trading and more bonus-share issuances both create more odd-lot remainders. Even the quieter 2024/25 figure is still billions of rupees changing hands in quantities under 10 shares at a time. This is a working corner of the market, not an edge case.

The one real cost: fixed charges on a tiny trade

There's no special odd-lot commission rate. The same schedule applies as any NEPSE trade: broker commission on a sliding scale from 0.36% down to 0.243% depending on trade size, a 0.015% SEBON fee, and a flat Rs 25 CDSC/DP charge per company per settlement, with a published Rs 10 minimum commission. The full breakdown, including the worked example on a Rs 1 lakh trade, is in the NEPSE trading cost post.

What's different about an odd lot is the denominator. Sell 6 shares at Rs 450 and the trade is worth Rs 2,700. The Rs 25 DP charge alone is nearly 1% of that, before the Rs 10 minimum commission and SEBON fee are even added. Run the same fixed charges against a Rs 1 lakh trade and they barely register. Small trades pay a proportionally larger toll everywhere on NEPSE, and an odd lot is the smallest trade you'll typically place.

What you actually need to know

1. Odd lot means fewer than 10 shares for almost every NEPSE scrip. It usually comes from a bonus-share ratio that doesn't divide evenly, or from selling part of a round-lot holding.
2. You need the separate Odd Lot order in TMS, and an exact price-and-quantity match. Check NEPSE's public odd-lot order book first, since TMS doesn't yet show it directly, then key the matching order in yourself.
3. The fixed charges are what hurt, not a special fee. The flat Rs 25 DP charge and Rs 10 minimum commission apply the same as any trade; on a tiny odd-lot sale, they simply take a much bigger bite.

Stuck with an odd lot and can't find a matching order on the website? Email parjanya57@gmail.com with the scrip and quantity, and I'll help you work out what to look for.

This post is part of the Nepal Money Basics guide — the investing section.