In reality, the specialists have little control over their stocks anymore. None of the specialists are making money, hence why the NYSE started giving them stipulations for providing liquidity.
Before the hybrid, a specialist controlled a few stocks. These days it's not uncommon for them to control a dozen or two (as per my understanding). Furthermore, their lack of knowledge of order flow has further decreased.
What you're seeing is people who probably send markets right after the open and are causing the price spikes causing their order to fill at the NBBO. On a thinner stock, this can be extremely detrimental (like SLG)
Please stop placing the blame on anyone else when you don't fully understand the situation.
If you don't want to trade NYSE, fine. More shares for me. To believe that your 'boycott' of them or their openings will affect anything is completely asinine. The only thing you're affecting is your own pocketbook.
Finally, as other people are saying, they are still disseminating their opening indications.
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To quote one of my favorite bloggers:
As more data keeps coming what is apparent is that the economy did not live up to the perma bears expectations. Go back and see last six months worth of news and opinions , it was full of doom and gloom. Inverted curve, housing lead slowdown, economy already in recession and you name it, every scary scenario was convincingly bandied about.
Now that actual GDP numbers are out expect the perma bear cheer leaders to offer no mea culpa, it will be more of how the data is manipulated and how it is one vast controversy. The fact remains average traders and investors like to read more about scary scenarios than about making profits. The number one ranked blog by readership in the Value Wiki list (if you forget the blog aggregator Seeking Alpha)is the most bearish and consistently wrong for years.It is a fascinating glimpse in to investors and traders psychology. Negativity is more popular.
Every crisis in financial market is immediately followed by commentators rushing to paint the extreme scenarios. Much of it is based on projection techniques commonly familiar to propaganda artists. Lot of what gets passed on is fiction. When Amaranth collapsed, there were extreme projections of gloom and doom. Looking back it was non event.
Now the Bear Stearns trouble are similarly being spun around to project various extreme scenarios. If you look at history of financial markets over several years, you will find markets take care of such events. Many times there is a rush to project an isolated firms problem as a large scale systemic problem.
Such crisis and panics are very good speculative opportunities. Such events often lead to extreme moves in market. Invariably after such panic there is an excellent profit making opportunity as stocks rebound vigorously once such panic passes. If market goes down 10% or more, you should be very excited,it indicates long opportunity might be around the corner.
At times like these perspective is very important. If you internalize some of the fiction being passed around and get shit scared, you will not be ready for the long side trade which setup during such time.
If you are a trader your mind should constantly be thinking about what is the trade in this mess.