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Strategies & Market Trends : After Hours Trading(ECN)-The Coming 24/7 Trading Explosion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tai Jin who wrote (46)	4/9/1999 9:03:00 PM
From: Lola	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 314

My experience with a spread on a totally electronic system is that often (in a fairly liquid stock) you can pick up the stock on the bid just as often as you can on the ask because you are dealing person to person via a computer. Therefore, I do not really consider that a spread. On a liquid stock that is say around $13, you will likely have a bid of 13.00 and an ask of 13.05 as a reasonable "spread". But on the TSE if you talk about a "spread" most people will scratch their heads because they don't know what you mean. A spread suggests a middleman, but in this system there is no middleman. When Americans talk about a spread, it is a much bigger gap than this because there is a middleman taking his "cut" That is what I consider "retailing stocks". My point is that the difference between the bid and ask should in 90% of the cases be almost nothing. That's my biggest beef with the American system, the fact that the spread is not more reasonable. Lola