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Non-Tech : Market Makers - What They Do and How They Do It -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (332)	1/13/2000 11:42:00 AM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 429

I agree with you completely. The best hope, IMO, is that the system evolves such that there is much more open competition and that forces the "big boards" to play honestly and change their rules to compete. I don't think you can count on the government to change things for you - they haven't done much to protect the public so far. I think the best tack might be to press Feds to force the NASDAQ and others to be open to competition. Competitive routing will force the changes needed. I had an account with Etrade shortly after they started and got into a dispute with them on order executions. One of their people gave me the name of their clearing agent in NY (they now clear internally) so I called him. The EGRiPe representative must have thought I worked at EGRP. When I asked the guy in NY how they got the Etrade account, he said something like "We bid for their order flow. Yea, we were the highest bidder and boy it didn't come cheap." Of course, the way they were able to pay Etrade to process the order flow was by scalping the spread. Those fancy ads and huge options to insiders of all the discount brokers have to be paid for somehow!