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Biotech / Medical : VVUS: VIVUS INC. (NASDAQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AlienTech who wrote (8764)	5/31/1998 7:22:00 PM
From: VLAD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23519

Alien, A few of you points are incorrect. INCA or instanet is part of the ECN which chares an additional 1.5 cents a share to trade on. You can not short on a down tick on INCA. There is no system available to short on down ticks for day traders but the market makers can short on down ticks. The main advantage of using INCA is that you can buy and sell shares inside the spread. The same applies to ISLD, ATTN, and TNTO. Also, INCA is the only system which allows after hours trading. Now as far as shares available for shorting goes, to my knowledge Vivus has not been shortable for the past week or two. Pershing does not have shares to short anymore and if they don't then I don't know any other clearing house that would. Pershing is one of the largest clearing houses out there (a division of DLJ) and they clear for many different brokerages. As far as market makers that are cheating out there. I would put Mayer & Schweitzer (MASH) and Smith Barney at the top of my list as prime suspects. This is based on my own personal observations of the level II screen on Vivus over the last 6 months. MASH represents Schwab that has a very large discount internet trading clientel. I suspect that MASH is allowing as many e-Schwab customers to short whenever they please. I have seen MASH on the ask more frequently than any other market maker. I have seen Smith Barney on the ask for extremely prolonged periods of time when the price of Vivus was under 10. I will (and you other longs should also) ask the SEC if they can check over the past trade dates and see if MASH or SBSH had adequate Vivus shares in there inventories at the time they were shorting the stock. I am not saying that I know that they are guilty but if they are they can expect some stiff fines (and hopefully a class action lawsuit from Vivus shareholders).