Wily - to whom exactly was ATG responsible for a public explanation of the particulars of the timing of taking VTS on-line? ATG guards its trade secrets very carefully, as it should - revealing answers to the question you seem to think they are obliged to answer might be revealing of its manner of doing business in ways that are ultimately detrimental to its interests.
Your question uses the word "delay" as if reasons why launch occur in late August as opposed to early July suggest ineptitude or sinister connotations. For example, you suggest "technical difficulties" which, when used in relation to a tech company. has a pretty negative connotation. And I agree that, if ATG were experiencing (or had experienced) serious "technical difficulties" with its computer systems, that would almost certainly be material and ATG would be required to disclose it once known to exist.
On the other hand, if you mean by "technical difficulties" the timing issues associated with the monumental task of (i) getting a complex trading system to interact seamlessly with customer computer systems having every different imaginable configuration, executing thousands of trades every day within seconds (9:20 a.m.) by executing a matching algorythm on tens of thousands of orders placed on the system from all of these different sources, on 400 (or more) different securities, without ever making an error, (ii) lining up and executing agreements with the parties who will provide credit facilitation and clearing services to handle huge block trades, (iii) marketing to, signing up, equipping and training customers (including public retirement plans, mutual funds, other institutional users, B/Ds, floor specialists of the PHLX, and god knows who else) to use the system, (iv) attracting enough critical mass at the outset so that the phase-in is a success, and the full ramp up (over a one year period) even more so, and (v) concurrently processing regulatory approvals relating to the operation of the system, including the roll out of intra-day iterations of VWAP and eventually seeking permission to trade widely traded NASDAQ stocks ---- well, I think when you consider the magnitude of coordinating all of that into a successful deployment, it may be unfair to hold them to a specific date to quite the extent you have -- which is to say that the difference between July and August is just not that meaningful in the context of ATG's long term future and makes and explanation kind of pointless.
I agree that the price rebound was nice, but was ultimately only retrenchment. The stock seems to have found a center in the low teens, and a drifting range of 8 - 12 pending tangible "new" developments. But today also showed that it has some pretty decent spring, and it repeatedly has had the capacity to sustain 25-40% gains in a single day. Which maybe makes it worth a little more respect and diligence than your posts suggest you have undertaken.
You may not want to hold ATG long term after taking a fair and careful look. I will concede that it is not completely out of the woods and ATS systems carry risks. But I wouldn't dismiss ATG like it is some sort of BB stock or gravity defying internet stock either. There are a great many serious components to its business plan. And I personally wouldn't get in its way for the moment.
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