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Strategies & Market Trends : The Options Box

QQQ 621.87

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Jan 30 4:00 PM EST

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To: TradeOfTheDay who wrote (1278)	6/3/2000 11:40:00 PM
From: Mark Z	Read Replies (1) of 10876

Fidelity and Schwab run hot and cold. Sometimes fills are instantaneous, sometimes I have to call and find out what's going on. The usual hangup is 'boating queue'. Both brokers manually review some trades (and how they determine which trades to review, neither will tell me) and that can cause serious delays in getting the order to the exchange. Schwab has held up orders of mine for as much as 14 minutes before forwarding it to the exchange. There are also reporting delays which are beyond the control of the broker. The past few months, the Amex in particular has been bad about giving prompt reports. I generally watch T&S and look for my order to appear there rather than constantly refresh the order status screen. Trade 'in the spread'. Not sure what that means. Between the bid and ask? If that's what you mean, the broker has nothing to do with this as the broker doesn't have specialists at the options exchange. They sell your order and the purchaser of the order either works it or doesn't (just puts it on the book) depending on what they feel like doing. As a general rule, highly liquid options can get filled between the bid and ask. I always go between the bid and ask, for example, with OEX orders. This rarely happens with highly illiquid options. At least that's been my experience. One other item you may want to consider looking into; find out how you specify the exchange to route an order to & if there's additional cost to doing so. You can shave upwards to a point on an options order given the spreads and variances in pricing found on the four exchanges. You can even play arbitrage games if you're nimble enough <g>.

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