Quote from coolweb:
jimford,
personally I haven't seen any problems with speciliasts,
Sure they will jerk you around sometimes,
but what else is there to do? No buy orders, You and a few other traders are there throwing in 500-1000 share lots.
Who else is there to buy/sell your shares? Specialists, So they play around with the price a bit, its not like the shares are going anywhere with your 500-1000 share buy order.
The key is knowing when there is a real buyer, then these jerk arounds won't happen.
You are un-informed on the process which makes you feel you are being victimized,
When I believe almost any decent trader will tell you, theres no such thing as victimized , Only no liquidity and bad fills.
A specialist won't fill you 500 shares and then let you profit 50 cents off that for no reason. The only time when he does it is because he has to, when theres 20 other orders also ready to buy, He has nothing else to do, BUT to turn up the price because of increase of demand.
He's not there to give you free money..
You will find 99% of the time when they jerk you around on price,
Stop trading and look @ the stock when the market closes @ 4:00 .
99% of the time the stock probably would have stayed stagnat mainly because there was no "real" demand. Just you , some specialists, and maybe some other traders and maybe one retail 200 share lot buyer 
Now how do you think a price would budge with a demand like that? You ain't getting jerked around, You are just playing in a sandbox full of piss and think hershey syrup might suddenly burst out from the sandbox floor. Its not going to happen.
Thats it.
Coolweb,
You are not paying attention to the allegations and evidence against NYSE.
You are incorrect to claim that I am complaining about situations in which an imbalance between supply and demand justifies the specialist's conduct. I am, on the contrary, complaining about situations in which there IS plenty of liquidity on BOTH sides of the market, so that the specialist's actions cannot be justified as anything other than a crime against the parties to the transaction, a crime against the markets, and a crime against society.
I don't like to repeat myself, but I will do so for you. I gave, as evidence, my example of my trades in SPY. I found that if I simply routed my orders away from AMEX and NYSE, I would receive, on average, much better prices on immediate executions, rather than waiting for specialists to drag their heels and impose their taxes and delays on my trades. SPY is a special case, because it has so much electronic liquidity away from the specialists. The prices available from this electronic liquidity provide a benchmark against which to judge performance of the specialists. This benchmark clearly demonstrates that something is wrong with specialist performance on SPY. This strongly suggests that the problem also exists for other symbols, even though we don't have electronic liquidity benchmarks to make it as obvious for those other symbols as it is for SPY.
You are dismissing allegations and supporting evidence, without paying any attention to the specifics. You are simply assuming that the allegations have no merit, but you are not taking the time to really consider them.
I am not blaming specialists for any interference with my trading personally. I have found ways to avoid dealing with specialists. Most traders would benefit from reduced costs and risks and increased trading opportunities, if the exchanges introduced appropriate technology and enforceable trading rules. Investors and society would also benefit.
I am sure that many traders are very happy to profit from NYSE inefficiencies. This doesn't mean that those inefficiencies benefit traders as a whole, or society as a whole. The specialist system is dying, so those traders had better find some other way to make their living.
