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Technology Stocks : SDL, Inc. [Nasdaq: SDLI] -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pat mudge who wrote (1277)	5/4/2000 8:09:00 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3951

Pat, SDLI options have been trading for quite some time, or my broker has been making up their symbols <g> Until now, I believe the AMEX was the only exchange carrying their options. Now that the CBOE will also carry them, traders should have a better chance for good prices and executions. When you place an options trade, if your broker is well-equipped to handle options, he or she can scan all the exchanges where the options are trading and route your order to the one with the best listed price. Now, this assumes your options trade on more than one exchange (there are four total). If there is only one exchange, you don't have anywhere else to go. Therefore, more exchanges is a good thing. A listing on the CBOE is also good, as they are the biggest exchange, and seem to be the most reliable (I have had a bad fill, for example, on Philly; that means you get a report that your order executed, only to learn later that they retracted that error because it was a "mistake" [not much you can do about this as they have a big time window in which to do it; this happened to me only once, trading SNDK calls about six months ago]). I believe most orders are routed to the CBOE by default in cases where: 1. A client does not specify an exchange or places a market order 2. A client places a trade online, even with a limit order 3. The broker does not have the ability to route a trade to a specific exchange (that would be most brokers, I'd guess) Another good reason to have more than one exchange is the reliability factor. For example, the first time SDLI plunged to 118ish intraday a few weeks ago, the AMEX quote system happened to be all screwed up. You had to have the broker call down to a floor trader to even get a quote. Since the stock (SDLI) was already incredibly volatile, the idea of trading options without a quote and a huge time delay meant it was like flying blind through a blizzard. That would have been a good day to have the CBOE as a backup. Here is a free-access link to the SDLI option chain on CBOE> quote.cboe.com