Interesting trading activity at Fidelity Spartan last week (as I continue to ponder whether to sign on with MBT, CyberT or Yamner):
Trading in INTC was fine. Fidelity routes orders to Knight Securities, which offers excellent and extremely rapid fills. Not infrequently, Knight will fill an INTC buy/sale at prices that I did not think I could get.
Trading in CIEN was terrible. Fidelity is its own MM in this stock. The fills are awful. How to describe? Examples:
a. Bid 11 1/4, Ask 11 5/16. Put in a market sell. Bid drops to 11 3/16 or even 11 1/4 for a nano-second, fills my sell, then comes back to 11 1/4. I'm sure (or would hope) that Yamner would route to a better MM than this.
b. Bid 11 1/4, Ask 11 5/16. For 5 minutes running, the bid/ask stays glued in this position as endless purchases of 1,000, 2,500 and 5,000 shares at the Ask go through. Almost no sales at the Bid. Then, at the end of the run, out prints a 100,000 share trade at 11 1/4. This happened many times and I just BET that the MM had taken in the lot, sold it off out of inventory, and then printed the lot late. This was great for the MMs 100,000 share customer. It wasn't great for me after the 100,000 share block showed up.
Trading in XYLN, which was slow on Friday, was interesting. After having bought limit, tt was nice putting in an offer to sell between the bid/ask, waiting, and watching it be filled. I'm sure MBT and CyberT would work well for this kind of activity.
Gary Korn |
