To: PartyTime who wrote (7328 ) 5/21/1998 11:22:00 PM From: Jon Tara Respond to of 18444
But, Party, I don't see any suspicious trades. And you can't tell me exactly what trades you are talking about. If you will specify the exact times and volumes of the trades, I'll be happy to look them up and say whether or not I agree with you. You certainly should report any suspicious market-maker activity to NASDR and the SEC. The problem with trying to finger suspicious market-maker activity, and the reason why such observations are often wrong, is that there is no way to tell how many shares are being bid or offered to the MMs. They are NOT required to "show their hand" by posting a bid or offer of all of their available shares or all of the shares that they want to buy. In fact, they are only required to bid or offer 100 shares. A customer could walk in and want to buy 100,000 shares, and the MM could post an offer to buy 100 shares. But wanna bet the stock slowly gets bid up? Vice-versa when somebody walks in and wants to sell 100,000, while the MM only posts an offer of 100 shares. Yes, it's unfortunate that us little guys don't get to see the whole picture. The situation is made somewhat more fair by the fact that all of the MMs don't have the whole picture, either. I'm strongly in favor of reforms that would place all NASDAQ trades in a "book", and make the book publically available. NYSE trades are booked, but the public may not view the book. I'm in favor of the public getting a look at the NYSE book as well. If you want to see what a book looks like, visit Island's book at isld.com (I'm afraid you'll have to download and install Sun's version of Java to use it.) Island is an ECN, and represents PART of NASDAQ's total volume. You can view the entire depth of the book (i.e. all of the limit orders that have been placed) for any NASDAQ stock. This is what I would like to see, but for the entire NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ.