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I think, in the two cases I posted about earlier, the specialist's actions were reasonable. Did I miss something in those? Even if you trade a stock day in and day out, the specialist will _still_ know more about the market for that stock than you will, because of his unique view of the order...

IB's TWS is pretty light on system resources. Where did you get this idea? The oldest machine I'm running TWS on is a PIII-450, but I'm sure it would run on much less. TWS's memory usage looks to be about 30Mb. The cool thing about IB's commission structure vs. MBT and the other $/ticket...

Personally,when I was first learning trading in the "SOES bandit" days, I remember "scalping" to mean making markets inside the spread, which generally meant about 1/4 or less profit, with very short (< 1 minute) time frames. I personally hate the term "day-trading" because it became such a...

Great link, Don. Thanks! You should post your favorites (links) list. It's so hard to find "the good stuff" among the huge number of sites out there.

That's usually the effect of a re-organization - the company is "re-capitalized" as part of the plan. Usually, the stock is _already_ worthless, if you look at the stockholders' equity on the balance sheet. They simply declare it as such and move on. Also, it seems that in the cases where a...

Just to clarify, I'm talking about trades that I put on in the after-hours session. I'm essentially putting on a spread to lock in a profit on a stock that has become over-valued in relation to the rest of the market, but I can't close the trade at a profit until the next morning, when the...

It seems that it's only reported monthly: http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/asp/short_interest.asp Same with the NYSE: http://www.nyse.com/press/NT00072E4E.html

Maybe I missed something? The 800@65.50 trade was at 10:16, in a 65.50-68.50 market (i.e. at the bid). The 500@69.00 trade was at 11:00 and is harder to read, but looks to have been closer to the bid, especially if it was printed a couple minutes after the actual verbal negotiation was made...

So far, so good. Looks like you read it right. Huh? Why was this situation any different? There was suddenly 38000 shares to buy. In this case, it looks like someone (maybe the specialist) stepped up and took the action, shorting the guy the stock, up 3/4 (1%, rounded up - pretty standard)...

Looking at the tape, the bid dropped at 14:05:34, and the offer was suddenly 100x45.90, which was pretty weighty, considering the quotes before it. Check out all the big prints that followed in the next couple minutes, all at 45.50 and below. It looks like what happened was there was over 100K...

Last night, there was news that BA got a contract from the DOD for $1B/year over 5 years. This seemed insignificant compared to their $60B annual revenue, so I put out 1100 up $1.30 from the close. Everything was looking good this morning until the jobs report lifted everything. The Dow was...

This was the first print >= 09:30:00, occurred on an ECN, and is apparently what a lot of quote vendors are using nowdays for "the open". FWIW, my consolidated tape (from Track Data) shows that this trade was subsequently cancelled. The trade immediately after it was 2000@52.70, which appears...

You don't have to wait for the stock to open if you send the orders direct to NYSE. I know you can send them at least as early as 09:25 - I haven't tried much earlier. Can someone comment on when the NYSE-mandated cutoff is supposed to be in order to get a piece of the opening print with a...

Great info. Who are you talking about? :-) Someone else posted about H&R Block, maybe on a different thread. I'd guess that you would be pretty lucky to find someone that specialized in traders at your local HRB office. There might be someone in the company somewhere, but it's probably a...

We're talking about IB.

Hmmm. I'm going to guess at something here. Where I live, I have neither DSL nor cable modem available, so I have to use dialup connections, which routinely fail during the day. Sometimes, it happens that I send a price change for an order, the exchange gets the price change, and the connection...

Bottom line: cost is a primary concern for me. Everyone else charges more just in their pass-through ECN and exchange fees than IB, not to mention the ones that charge per-ticket fees on top. For me, it's thousands of dollars a month in difference. Maybe some of you guys are knockin 'em dead out...

I'm pretty confident that they are part of the consolidated tape feed that all the vendors get. Track Data has them - I think they get their feed via S&P. I know I've seen them at IB a long time ago. My guess is that they disabled them because newbies assumed they were firm quotes and got in...

http://www.amextrader.com/Trader/News/amexnotices/120401.stm As freehouse pointed out, you wouldn't want to try to send/change/cancel orders to AMEX's execution system quickly anyway, because it's too slow. That must not have stopped some from trying, though, which no doubt gave them more...

Even a non-programmer can use one of the automated "if this dialog appears, then press this button" tools that are out there to do things automatically in Windows apps. There used to be one called "RtvReco" that I used to get rid of annoying messages. I'm sure there are others now. Of course...