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Non-Tech : Meet Gene, a NASDAQ Market Maker -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: manfmnantucket who wrote (1299)	1/12/2001 11:57:39 AM
From: LPS5	Respond to of 1426

Hey manf, No, I'm not - nor have I been - a market maker/equity dealer. I've spent a good deal of time on (and managing) (a) proprietary equity desk(s), though. And, like anyone else in the securities industry, I have extensive contacts. First, I'd say that the real in-depth use of the information is done on an offline basis. Any realtime usage of information would be limited to retail/institutional purchase, sale and size activity - and that, of course, occurs as well. It should come as no surprise that as dealers fill orders, they accordingly adjust their own positions to balance the providing of liquidity and risk management (at several levels) as appropriate. Indeed, much of the money flow information cited is publicly available, but not nearly as quickly, or directly, as a firm with direct access to that information would have access to it. Such information can also, as was previously mentioned, be used to confirm/refute the publicly available reports you speak of, or tailored to meet internal benchmarking or departmental purposes. Nothing beats being able to say, "At 12:46 today, our proprietary indicators confirmed the prediction/refuted the assertion...," rather than waiting for an end-of-week, or once-per-month report. And, it makes great proprietary soft dollar research to garner additional institutional flow as well. Now, as for firms permitting individuals to wire into them via SDKs or APIs, there are certainly some that exist. However, I'm not aware of dealing firms that would permit this to a non-broker dealer, and in particular, you're not going to find one that wants to share in your account with you. First of all, the regulators generally* forbid broker dealers from sharing in the profit/losses in an account with a public customer. Second, I'd bet that most couldn't be bothered following a retail customer's trading strategies, though some might. *I say "generally," because there are a few exceptions and caveats, but in my experience those are almost always discarded in favor of the far wiser and safer, "no sharing in customer accounts" policy. LPS5