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Non-Tech : CYBERTRADER -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William W. Dwyer, Jr. who wrote (1805)	1/30/1999 9:04:00 PM
From: tanstaafl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3216

Hi Bill, "Problem with ISLD, though, (other than getting to ISLD indirectly through SNET) is that you can only buy at the bid or sell at the offer." This is not exactly true. First, you can make a better inside bid/ask provided you do not equal the opposite ask/bid in your attempts to do so. It's not the same has hitting/lifting a bid/offer, but it's a bit better than being constrained to simply joining the best bid/offer. (which is how I interpreted the above statement) Second, ISLD will always try to match you up with another ISLD order internally before posting to L2. This is, of course, a very fast fill as you are doing an ISLD to ISLD transaction. As a result of this you can enter an order which even crosses the market, PROVIDED, there is a counterpart available on ISLD. When there is no internal counterpart is when the order rejections occur. I think this logic holds true for any ECN. Obvisouly, without access to the ISLD book, you are at a disadvantage. I have on occasions exited positions a level below the inside mkt in this fashion. I'm looking forward to Cyber adding additional ECN books in the not too distant future. I agree with you that playing MM is not realistic, but not really due to execution limitations. In my opinion the spreads are too narrow at this point in time. I personally think the idea of not paying the spread is a vestige of the days when spreads were wider and the mm's were not as aware of the "daytraders", etc. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to buy at the bid at the RIGHT time, but past experience has shown me that if I can get a stock at the bid, I probably would have been better off without it at that price. :-} Cheers. Steve