Hi Jan Crawley; My feeling regarding ECNs is that they are the wave of the future. 90% of my daytrades are on ISLD. (This is a market participant abbreviation, not a stock symbol.)
So why do I use ISLD? Simple. In my case, it is the cheapest, but it also has great liquidity. Right now I just can't imagine trading on anything else. And if you look at the volume that ISLD does on high volatility stocks like AMZN, it is amazing.
ISLD has fully 23% of the activity in AMZN for July, nearly triple that of the nearest competitor, NITE. The top seven contenders:
ISLD
ISLAND ECN (THE) E 23%
NITE
KNIGHT SECURITIES, INC. M 8%
MLCO
MERRILL LYNCH, PIERCE, FENNER & SMITH INCORPORATED 7%
MASH
MAYER & SCHWEITZER, INC. 6%
INCA
INSTINET CORPORATION 6%
SHON
SCHONFELD SECURITIES, LLC 3%
MSCO
MORGAN STANLEY & CO., INCORPORATED 3%
nasdaqtrader.com
I don't follow the financials (been burned too many times in the past), but I don't think Datek/Island is publicly traded:
pcworld.com
So the only way to get shares might be to go to work there :)
datek.com
I believe that the ECNs are taking profits away from market makers, both from smaller spreads, and also from less frequent market maker commissions.
That said, my suspicion is that there will always be enough ECNs active to keep the competition high. So overall, I really don't see any winners, just reduced costs for the consumer. But if someone made me invest in one, I'd go with Datek/Island. Note that this is not the stock ISLD.
-- Carl |
