To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (101306 ) 1/22/2008 12:58:11 PM From: ig Respond to of 306849 what you guys are saying makes no sense. brokers likely did their clients a huge favor today by being incompetent and not executing orders at the open, the vast majority of which would have been SELL orders. since the market opened on the lows, the brokers saved their clients money in the aggregate. of course, that doesn't excuse their incompetence, but your conspiracy theory makes absolutely no sense. SELLs probably did get filled at the lows, and BUYs got filled later at the higher prices. Happens all the time. Happened to me several years ago. Some news came out about some crazy internet stock du jour and I got in at 12 for the gapper. Lo and behold, the next morning it opened at 26. But the volume was insane and I couldn't get a trade confirmation for a few hours. Turned out they filled my SELL a few hours after the open, when the price had fallen to 19. And now, the rest of the story.... The day before, after the market had closed, I'd told an online friend about the overnight trade I'd entered. I was pretty excited about it, figuring I'd make a lot of money on it. He got excited about it, too, and entered a market BUY on it for the open. He used the same online broker I did, in fact. Waterhouse. Well, I told him that he was making a mistake, that he'd missed the play and to just keep his powder dry and wait for the next one. But he wanted to get in and nothing would stop him. Well guess what: his BUY got filled immediately at the open, at 26, while my SELL languished 2 hours until the price fell to 19. Are you getting the picture? Essentially, some market-maker shorted his ass off all morning at the highs (selling to people like my friend) and then covered by buying my shares at the lows. I was so pissed off, I called the SEC and harangued some hapless drone there for a solid hour. I was told that my order was surely filled whenever it came up in the queue, and that the problem was simply that there were too many orders ahead of mine and that's why mine was filled so late. I told them about my friend's order that was filled immediately at the open, even though he'd entered his order a long time after mine, but they just BS'ed me for another 30 minutes until I finally got fed up. I'm sure there were plenty of mirror image scenarios in this morning's market: MMs and specialists buying with both hands at the open (filling SELL orders), then filling the BUYs later on at much higher prices, and blaming the "the system" for the delays. It's pretty hard to prove anything in these situations. That's when I quit daytrading and moved into position trading. Live and learn.