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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Earl who wrote (18582)	11/20/1997 9:41:00 AM
From: BP Ritchie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Well, thanks anyway Don! Your posts are always helpful. About the options & short sellers ... I think there are some games being played, and I don't understand how the games work (I don't mean the rules ... I mean the market mechanisms). I'm pretty sure that some people are breaking the 'rules'. A while ago I placed a small sell order that exactly matched an open buy order that I saw in the Island ECN display ... my order did not execute. I called my local broker to find out why ... and was initially told that it was because my order was 'too far off the market' ... when I gave them the details of the matching buy order and we compared timestamps (also told them that I believed that someone deliberately withheld my sell order) ... they 'altered' the story and spoke with their 'trader' that they subcontract the NOVL orders out to ... and then confirmed to me that the trader did not enter the order, but instead kept the only record of it on a paper notepad in his office, and let it expire ... they gave me his name and now expect me to make a formal complaint to someone (NASDQ, I think). Until I could give them specific timestamps and references they simply told me that I must be mistaken ... I believe they have done this to me before ... I have many times had outstanding orders that seem to have been within the trading range for the period that they were open that did not execute and expired ... this is the first time that I managed to get some real insight into what happened. I'm not really sure how all this stuff works, but it seems to me that in many cases (probably) actual investor's buy and sell orders are not being processed ... but, rather 'managed' by someone to create an opportunity for themselves. It appears to me now that the bias for this management is to push the price down ... I suspect that the people doing this will make money when the price goes back up again, probably off of the increasing short position being liquidated. I was hoping that by getting some understanding of the options positions that the puzzle would become easier to solve ... and possibly predict when the (Traders or MMs 'management') bias might change. I guess I'll have to just keep plugging away at other ways of getting to the bottom of this concern. Eric Strohmeyer ... can you help with understanding options, not rules ... but interpretations of the current put/call ratio and what this might mean in terms of 'smart money' expectations? PS ... I'll reply to your previous note about Eric Schmidt's time line ... he did send me some email about a month after he started that indicated his time frame is pretty much the same as what you are reporting now. PPS Should be a 'very interesting' day today ... lowest sell order seems to be 9 3/4, highest buy order 7 3/4 ... at least when I started typing this note (about 9:15) ... another Very Low Volume day coming up?