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Technology Stocks : Ultratech Stepper -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Demosthenes who wrote (2595)	7/26/1998 10:37:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3696

Pete, Chime, CHIME, CHIME NASDAQ uses Market Makers, NYSE / AMEX use Specialists. Prior to the New SEC rules, about 97% of the NASDAQ trades were unmatched. i.e. For you to buy 100 shares from me, I would sell 100 shares to a market maker who would, in turn sell them to you. At that time, yes, one could divide reported volume by 2 to get a reasonable approximation of the actual number of shares trading with the middle man eliminated. But sometimes trades are counted when one market maker sells shares to another market maker. So, it's nearly impossible for individuals to determine precisely what the demand by end investors/traders/speculators actually is. (both before and after the new SEC rules). With the new SEC rules, if the Bid / Ask is $10 / $10.50. I can put in a bid for $10 1/8. This will be immediately seen by all. If you're willing to put in an Ask for 10 1/8 and no market maker jumps in, then a trade will be made between you and I directly without a market maker getting in the middle and taking his $0.50. I've never seen any statistics since the new SEC rules came into force that show what %age of shares are matched today. But I'd guess it's greater than the 3-4% prior to the rule change. RE my estimate of 90,000 shares a day, it was about 1/2 of the average daily volume reported by SI (look to the bottom right hand corner of this screen) and a little more than 1/2 the volume that you reported from the WSJ short interest Data base. Nothing scientific, just what I think is probably a reasonable ballpark guess. This is not an issue on either AMEX or NYSE or TSE or most other markets which are auction based. 1 specialist per stock is charged with maintaining an orderly market. Buy/sells are matched close to 100% of the time. i.e. To my knowledge, specialists don't tend to hold positions for subsequent trading purposes. I hope this helped, Ian.