Quote from kungfoofighting:
"Doing a legitamite conversion on an exchange is no better if the purpose is to pound bids. Those days are over. Learn to trade. Learn to offer short at the appropriate time. "
You have clearly bought into the government sanctioned bias towards going long. Scalping is a legitimate form of TRADING. If a stock is running up, I buy offers, if the stock is running down, I sell bids. If you want to go long stock, is it necessary to "bid at the appropriate time"? I guess you never go long by taking the ask, huh? If I want to buy half a million shares of stock and do so by ripping offers all the way, there is no SEC regulation to stop me from doing so. Likewise, there should be no restriction on how aggressively I choose to sell bids when going short. At some point, someone will step in and absorb the selling pressure in the same way buying pressure is absorbed. The uptick rule was created in the '30s to prevent relentless short selling during a market crash. The futures don't have an uptick rule, and they don't trade to zero during catastrophic events. Bullets provided an opprtunity to level the playing field, where one could go short or long equivalently. The fact that market makers and specialists have never been restricted by an uptick rule is criminal. Common sense would tell you that if a stock is falling, there are going to be no upticks, and nobody is buying offers. How should one go about getting short in such a situation?
Those who claim that the ruling did not come about from daytraders nailing bids when stocks were hit with bad news, or other selling pressure need to face reality. Forward conversions and bullets have been around for a long time but only in the last couple of years did instant bullets become commonplace. With the increasing ease with which traders were able to go short, market makers took notice. Market makers and specialists did not like that they didn't have the edge any more. Several years ago when the firm I was at was one of the first to offer instant bullets, it was amazing how easy it was to get the best fills because everyone else was trying in vain to hit upticks or get taken on the offer. This is like being in a gunfight where you are equipped with a machine gun, and your enemies have 6-shot revolvers. Would you give up that edge and allow everyone to have automatic weapons? Market makers want this advantage for themselves, and now they have it.
While forward conversions do have some risk of having the long shares called away, and are thus not quite as risk free as married puts, the SEC clearly mentioned that they felt that conversions were also illegal. Any firm that allows the use of conversions will likely have the SEC crawling up their asses. As such, REAL equities trading(going long and short with no bias, or impediments) is dead.