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Biotech / Medical : Labwire Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: im a survivor who wrote (1269)	9/12/2008 11:53:21 AM
From: rogerover	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1698

I have traded thinly traded OTC-BB and Pink Sheet stocks for many years. Although the bids generally originate from individuals, they are posted by market makers. I have one account with a small west coast market maker and one with TD Ameritrade, but in either case, when I put an order in to buy or sell a stock it hits the system with a market maker's ID on it. Ameritrade usually uses NITE or SBSH. If the prevailing bid-ask is .078 x .11, as it was yesterday, I could have sent one guy in at .079 bid, and if anyone sold to him, he would have taken the shares into his "house account" at .079 and then immediately moved them to me at .08, or .085, or whatever price would take into account the commission that he was charging me (it would depend on how many shares I was buying). Without investigating or looking at the prior post, I'm assuming that this is what was happening with the "matched" .07 and .075 prints. Each print represented the same block of shares that was sold to an individual's market maker at .07 and then reprinted as it was transferred to the individual's account at .075 -- meaning that the broker/MM's commission was a half-cent per share. Now, on this... "It's amazing how many posts we see about what the MM's are doing with LBWR" I am in full agreement with you. Market maker conspiracy theories, or stupid statements like "the MMs are loading up!" or "the MMs are trying to push it down to collect cheap shares!" are baseless 99% of the time. There are a handful of MMs that trade for their own account, and occasionally when MMs get in trouble by shorting out a few shares of a thinly traded stock (just to make the market) and it then moves against them they might all drop their bids at once to try to trick people into selling (I've seen this happen, but it's illegal), but most of the time they're simply reflecting actual orders from individuals and funds.