Quote from Zr1Trader:
Some HFT is just used to JAM everyone else in the ass by slowing down the whole system/feed with thousands of quotes a second, miles away from the bid/ask . But yeah, crooked things happened either way, its wallstreet.
They think retail volume is gone now, just wait till after everyone gets shafted in this kind of IPO....
You are right about the hft :
"Thanks to the work of Telis Demos in an article âRaindropsâ raise questions after Facebook IPO we now know the cause of the opening delay was excessive quote cancellations. From the article:
And it was one quote cancellation sneaking into a five-millisecond window that caused about 20 painful minutes, watched live by the world on CNBC television, of the delay to the opening of Facebookâs initial public offering on Nasdaqâs US market.
..
In brief, the problem was that the system took two extra milliseconds to calculate the opening price. Because of a decision before to allow continuous order placement during IPOs, cancellations kept âfitting in between the raindropsâ, in the words of Bob Greifeld, Nasdaqâs chief executive, in the five milliseconds it was taking to determine a price.
Only High Frequency Traders (HFTs) can cancel quotes at that rate. And ironic enough, it was mostly HFTs that benefited later when Nasdaq quotes stopped coming from the Securties Information Processor (SIP) which transmits quotes for everyone who doesn't get the premium direct feeds. The nearly 2 hour outage, from 11:54 ro 13:50 can be seen in Charts 9 and 10 below. Those who are co-located and get the direct feeds, namely HFTs, didn't experience this problem, as trades continued to come from Nasdaq."
http://www.nanex.net/aqck/3099.html