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Technology Stocks : 3Com Corporation (COMS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Souze who wrote (43341)	5/26/2000 1:27:00 PM
From: David E. Taylor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 45548

Souze: Go into the link to Thomson's that I posted, enter COMS for the ticker, and look at 9:50. There were two messages at that time, a "buy super message" for 450,000 at $37.25, and a "buy message" for another 300,000 at the same price. Those were on top of two earlier messages (at 9:25), a "buy super message" for 100,000, and a "buy message" for 300,000 at about the same price. Thomson's has explanations for each of these messages, the "super messages" in particular indicate an institutional buyer with a definite requirement for a specific number of shares at a specific price. Typically following such "super" buy messages, you'll see the bid/ask increase as the MM's accumulate the shares to sell to the institutional buyer at the specified price (which soaks up the available smaller volume selling), plus some follow through as smaller investors pick up the institutional buy. Same thing in reverse if there are "sell" messages. Actually, my Q-Charts feed now only shows one of those two trades of 575,000 at $37.25, whereas when I made my previous post, it showed two back-to-back trades of the same volume at the same price, so maybe they could only rustle up enough at $37.25 to meet half the requirement and the other got cancelled. The Thomson's info (IMO) is useful because it can give you a "heads-up" on short term price movements, for example if you're looking for an entry/exit point on a particular day. It also tells you which direction the institutions are looking on a given day - today around 85% of the volume is institutional and mostly on the buy side, and only about 15% retail. David T.