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Strategies & Market Trends : Buy and Sell Signals, and Other Market Perspectives -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DebtBomb who wrote (3651)	5/7/2010 11:17:54 AM
From: ggersh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220927

This Isn’t Sandlot Baseball static.open.salon.com Back when I was a little kid, we used to play lots of sandlot baseball. Sometimes things would happen-a ball would hit a low hanging tree branch-something out of the ordinary. Someone would shout “Do over”. Then we’d play it over again. The stock market should not get a do over. If they made a bad trade, they ought to eat it. No one told them how to program their algorithm-shit happens in markets. Sorry, sometimes they get volatile and you make mistakes. Sometimes weird things happen and you get lucky. In NYC, they want to bust a bunch of trades that happened in dark pools and off the market. Ironically, things at the NYSE were pretty “good”. The low of PG is quite a bit different there than it was in the off market places. Guys in the dark pool, ECN, and on trading desks got hurt. Tough shit. They want to have their cake and eat it too. At the CME, there were no problems. Everything got executed, no trades need to be busted. Can you imagine someone who is trading a cash basket of stock against the S+P futures would feel if their cash trade was busted-but they have to keep their futures trade. Could be pretty adverse to their equity. Might be good for their equity too, depending on the position. They want to blame this on a fat finger. Conspiracy theorists already are speculating it was a coordinated attack(I think that’s a bunch of hooey). But, the fat finger argument is weird. Every front end computer system that I have seen has a window that asks you if you want to make the trade. You can elect to disable this window in the interest of speed. Every front end I know of also lets you set a limit to how many contracts you will enter. Apparently, they disabled this feature too. When you do that you have to accept the consequences of your actions. The real answer is to end the internalization of order flow, end the dark pools, end the payment for order flow, end fungibility. It’s good to have competition and liquidity in one market space. The NYSE ought to be the place where all NYSE listed stocks trade, and the NASDAQ for their stocks. If another exchange wants to compete, let them compete-but the clearing model on the SEC side of the business is clearly flawed. By the way, based on yesterday’s action, the Dodd bill is already antique. DC ought to start over on that too.