Quote from B1010:
What I've been doing the past 12 months or so is to pay a lot more attention to charts rather than size. Learning to find strong or weak charts in stocks that I am comfortable trading. Also watching sectors a lot more than I used to. Size is becoming more and more meaningless. Institutions have caught on to the size trading by daytraders and really play games now. And also they seem to be sending a lot more order flow away from the specialist to ECN's. This way they able to control how their order is executed and seen by the specialist and daytraders instead of givng some specialist control who may decide to take a profit himself on a large order.
Quote from Steve Tvardek:
If you are watching the price action of the stock closely, you should know when to worry and when not to when the spec shows a "1" on the offer. If you are just trading stocks off a filter that shows size or market shorts only, you'll have a much harder time figuring out if you should hold or cover.
Quote from narballs:
the past year i found how the specialist spreading to have the most change. specialists used to spread up / down frequently to sweep up open book limit orders. but the past year with ecn gaining market share specialist spreading has been very irregular. this has affected my trading the most imo.
Quote from Dogballoon:
Remember that open book is delayed by up to 5 sec. It's also strictly the limits placed through SDOT or with the specialist.