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To: TFF who wrote (12009)	6/28/2007 4:44:10 PM
From: TraderAlan	Respond to of 12617

<NYSE supporters will say this episode is a "victory for the humans,"> hilarious.

To: TFF who wrote (12009)	7/5/2007 6:55:32 PM
From: TFF	Respond to of 12617

NYSE's Electronic Arm Broke Wyeth Trades By Aaron L. Task Editor at Large 7/5/2007 5:00 PM EDT The fallout from the June 28 trading snafu in shares of Wyeth (WYE - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating), AT&T (T - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating) and Jefferies (JEF - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating) contains a lot of heavy irony. It's ironic the New York Stock Exchange championed the episode as a victory of "man vs. machine" when trades on Wyeth were canceled on the Big Board's own electronic platform, NYSE Arca. "Upon learning of the NYSE's halt of WYE, NYSE Arca conducted a thorough review of all trades occurring between 9:30 a.m. and 10:26 a.m.," Paul Adcock, Executive Vice President, NYSE Arca Trade Support, said in a statement prepared for TheStreet.com. "In a collaborative effort with other exchanges, NYSE Arca was able to quickly and effectively rectify the situation and ensure that investors were not disadvantaged." TheStreet.com's review of data on Bloomberg suggests that the NYSE Arca canceled trades of nearly 1.8 million shares in Wyeth that occurred between 9:30 a.m. EDT and around 10:25 a.m., when the NYSE officially halted trading in the stock. The bulk of the canceled trades occurred at prices above $58.55, including one trade of more than 85,000 shares at $59.50. Thus, NYSE Arca roughly hewed to the parameters of the Nasdaq's halt in Wyeth, as did other members of the UTP Operating Committee. That is an intermarket policymaking and administrative body of regional exchanges such as the Boston and Philadelphia Stock Exchanges and alternative platforms such as the International Securities Exchange (ISE - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating). However, NYSE Arca did cancel a handful of Wyeth trades below $58.55, including nearly 12,000 shares at between $58.18 and $58.36. The reason for those trades being canceled is unknown at this time. Linkages Set to Intensify Irony No. 2 is that the saga turned into a tit-for-tat battle between the NYSE and Nasdaq on the eve of adaptation of new rules designed to the more closely link the exchanges -- and all other trading platforms. July 9 will mark the launch of the third of a planned four-phase rollout of Regulation National Market System, or NMS, a Securities and Exchange Commission directive "designed to prevent 'trade-throughs' -- the execution of an order in its market at a price that is inferior to a price displayed in another market." Practical implementation is less clear-cut, because some traders say getting the best execution may entail breaking up an order rather than simply taking the best price available. But essentially, the SEC wants trading to be platform-agnostic by forcing broker-dealers to use so-called intermarket sweep orders to find the best price for a trade, regardless of whether it's posted on the NYSE, Nasdaq, Amex or an alternative platform such as Kansas City-based BATS Trading. "You've got a lot going on," says Mark Madoff, co-chair of the Compliance Committee at the Security Traders Association, a trade organization for the industry. "What's happened is we're in a transition period, going from a single market platform -- either NYSE or Amex or Nasdaq operating -- to competition in general prompted by Reg NMS. There's far more competitors trading stocks [and] a lot of technological changes happening." Those technological changes, spurred by regulation or competition or both, come in the wake of not just last week's problems with Wyeth, AT&T and Jefferies but other recent technological glitches too. Somewhat overshadowed by the hyperbolic coverage of Blackstone's (BX - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) June 22 IPO was that some brokers began trading the stock before its official NYSE opening. The NASD-operated Alternative Display Facility erroneously reported that four trades had been executed by brokers, forcing the electronic National Stock Exchange to later to cancel about $100,000 in Blackstone trades after realizing they were executed too early, Forbes reported.