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Strategies & Market Trends : The Final Frontier - Online Remote Trading -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TraderAlan who wrote (5109)	8/28/1998 7:54:00 AM
From: H-Man	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12617

Your're not alone in that thought. I know of no-one who does not think 7900 will be had.

To: TraderAlan who wrote (5109)	8/29/1998 7:34:00 AM
From: TraderAlan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12617

My following experience in late July brought me to both SI and my new EDT firm (Polar Trading). This new manual order handling process will be a bonanza for the EDT industry. Thanks to T. Carey at Barrons. Barrons 8/31 issue: "Reader Alan Farley, publisher of The Hard Right Edge (http://www.hardrightedge.com), a Web site aimed at day traders, reports a troubling experience with Brown & Co. (We were unable to evaluate Brown's new trading site last March as the firm did not supply us with a trading account.) According to Farley, he had been getting instant executions on the four stocks he trades exclusively with market orders: Intel, Microsoft, Cisco and Dell, not exactly small-caps. However, in mid-July, he reports, "My first four market orders for Intel did not execute for three to five minutes for both the buy and the sell (my holding period is only 10-15 minutes). They did so only when the issue ticked against my position, resulting in slippage in each case. Then I placed a 1,000-share market order for Microsoft. It did not execute for over three minutes and I pulled the order." Farley contacted one of Brown's traders, who told him that Brown's market makers started pulling down their automated execution systems when they decided it was a "fast" market, and forced orders to be processed manually. Farley contends: "This gives them the means to manipulate the tape rather than allowing liquidity and demand within the automated orders to help move the market." A trader at Brown & Co. says the problem isn't that the market makers are holding orders or purposely manipulating trades, but that there's a delay in the reports when a stock's volume leaps and its share price fluctuates wildly. "There's nothing we're doing to manipulate those orders. We're just waiting for the market makers to give us the execution reports," according to the trader. When a customer places a market order, that customer is entitled to the price available at the time of the order, and, according to Brown's trader, "If the market maker makes a mistake, we can adjust the price. We know exactly when an order was placed and when it was filled." Day traders like Alan Farley are particularly sensitive to price changes on quickly moving stocks, and are more likely to notice a difference between the price they expect and what they get. Of course, that can happen just as easily to those who trade the old-fashioned way over the phone." Alan