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

To: LUANNE CLAY-RUSSELL who wrote (4702)	5/25/1999 8:57:00 PM
From: Mark Z	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 7382

First, don't believe everything the reps at MB tell you especially if they're feeling crunched which appears to be most of the time. For example, this a.m. when I saw the VBScript error with a specific program/line# reference while trying to retrieve my margin reports, I was told the problem was my ISP. It wasn't and about 15 minutes later they started flashing msgs acknowledging their programming error and that they were fixing it. I think the reps at MB are trained to blame everything on your ISP from confirmable Real Tick bugs to missing or erroneous margin reports. That said, I believe ARCA takes 32nds because I've been filled at 32nds when placing an order at 16ths. I doubt its harder to get a fill at a 32nd than at any other price. If there's a counter-party willing to sell what you're going to buy (or vice versa), the order will fill. You might end up with a 1/32nd price improvement as orders at 16ths are more common. ARCA can be very slow if there's no matching order for yours on any ECN - either ARCA itself or REDI, BRUT, et al. That's because ARCA will preference via SNET the 'most likely' MM to fill you. 'Most likely' is an algorithm that's described by Gerry (may be 'J'erry) Putnam somewhere on this or the Terra Nova thread. And ARCA will wait a certain amount of time before cancelling (if not filled) and moving on to the next best MM on their list. Others may have better schemes but I only use ARCA in 2 situations. First, in a fast moving market if I absolutely, positively need a fill, I'll place my price outside the current bid/ask and let ARCA fill me as it finds shares (provided I don't see Island near the bid/ask with sufficient size). MMs (SOES/SNET) are useless in my experience in these situations. Second, if I want to hit an ARCA bid/offer or another ECN whose bid/offer is visible to me. If I can see ARCA will just place an SNET order for me, I won't use it. I can mimic manually their SNET preferencing and manually cancel/re-place much quicker than ARCA does if I need to. When placing a bid/offer for which there's no match anywhere, I really don't know if Island or ARCA is better. A lot depends on the specific security and how active it is and the size of your bid. A major disadvantage to Island, given MB doesn't offer us Island subscription, is the dreaded partial fill followed by a cancellation due to a crossed/locked market. With ARCA, you're guaranteed at least 100 shares. Nothing worse than getting a 7 share fill and then the 'cross/locked' market cancelling the balance of your order. Finally, if you don't want your bid/offer posted/visible, you can do that through ARCA. With MB's version of Real Tick, you can't through Island.