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Strategies & Market Trends : How To Write Covered Calls - An Ongoing Real Case Study! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kmartin who wrote (9848)	3/2/1999 11:20:00 PM
From: Mark Z	Respond to of 14162

Yes, in my experience it is normal for brokers to give the composite quote rather than each individual exchange's quote. I've not used eTrade so I can't tell you how you can trade on a specific exchange (or even if you can) through them. I'd suggest you contact them and ask about it. My experience has been that if the broker permits you to specify an exchange to route your order to, generally you need to call in the trade, ask for each individual exchange's quote and hope it doesn't shift between the time you place your order and your broker gets it to the floor. I've used Discover, Brown, Quick & Reilly and Schwab. Discover & Schwab let me specify the exchange, Brown and Q&R don't. Schwab generally will route the order where its to your best advantage (truly, for all their problems, I routinely get price improvement on spreads and even straight calls/puts). Discover sells the order so if you let them route it, the MM they route the order to will pick the exchange that is to their best advantage. When I used them I rarely got price improvement. The same is true for Q&R and Brown. I've also heard of an outfit called Preferred Capital that lets you select the exchange via some custom software they give you but I've not used them.