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To: noiserider who wrote (1342)	3/27/2001 7:17:54 PM
From: aldrums	Respond to of 1426

It's possible some inexperienced trader was entering buy orders for 60 shares on Datek or the Island ECN at 39 7/16 or higher instead of 38 5/8 (the ask price). If there was nobody on the Island above the Ask price and below your price you would get filled. It's amazing it happened three times. The person probably didn't realize the mistake until after the third trade. Congratulations! Alex

To: noiserider who wrote (1342)	3/27/2001 7:37:29 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1426

Hi noiserider; This is something I've seen happen from the other side. The guy had a finger error and took out the ISLD ask for CMGI, if I recall. He immediately had the "24" cancel as many of the resulting 10 or so trades, but they would only cancel the ones that were more than 1/2 out of the money. He kept the other shares as an "investment", LOL!!! The other thing that's going on here is the fact that the fills were at 60 shares. Sometimes orders for less than 100 shares can hang around on ISLD at prices they shouldn't, as the prices are not shown to the Naz, so only ISLD subscribers know that there is a free arbitrage available. But that doesn't have anything to do with what happened here, as that weirdness is on the "limit order" side of the market, rather than the "market order" side. It's pretty clear that someone was buying shares on ISLD using a "market order" (or a very high limit price), and you just happened to have the lowest ask price. One of the trading techniques that might use this is the guys who trade "baskets" of stocks. The idea is that you arrange for your computer to send out market orders on a basket of stocks all at the same time, and you decide when to buy or short based on futures prices or c. The guys who do this are usually big enough that I wouldn't think they'd be into 60 shares, but maybe someone was running a test program with smaller share size. But even this seems weird, cause that sort of trade cannot be done over a very short time interval, so there would be no reason to do it three times within minutes. And why would they do it on SPOT, where I would guess the spreads would absolutely decimate market order traders? -- Carl