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Technology Stocks : THQ,Inc. (THQI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NeverRight who wrote (7537)	8/14/1998 3:56:00 PM
From: Marc Newman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14266

I have to add that Datek, which is sort of the king of free real-time quotes, doesn't offer bid and ask sizes. At least they don't on the "classic" site and the deluxe site is too slow and cluttered to use, IMO. However, I also have DLJ and can confirm that the bid/ask can be very useful. In fact, I keep DLJ up just for the bid/ask these days. It helps on days like this when THQI is thinly traded. Here's an example. I just sold some AAPL in order to put the money back into THQI. Bid was 28 13/16 and the ask was 29. Spread was 2 by 15. Market was weakening so I thought, hey, I bet I can get this cheaper. I put in an order for 600 at 28 7/8. That raised the bid to 28 7/8 and the size to 6. (For 600 shares.) No action in a few minutes, NASDAQ was slipping, so I pulled the order to see what happened. Sure enough, it went back to the old bid but this "dropping of the bid" seemed to make some investor hit the sell button for his 200 shares. Then everything dropped a bit. Couple thousand shares traded. I decided 28 3/4 would be a good enough buy for me on the day. Put in my order there, the bid again jumped up there with my size. Nothing for a bit, and then a MM gave it to me and dropped the bid again. Of course now the ask is 28 3/4 anyway, so anybody can buy at that price now. It's been a fun correction for me. Switched out of a lot of THQI at $34 avg and into AAPL at $35. Now switching horses back. Plus I've just had a few thousand THQI reach cap gains status, so I feel that I have more flexibility. Feel that I could just leave the computer for a few months and come back to find this stock significantly higher. Marc