On the stock I was trading, the bid suddenly jumped by about $.30 (to $20.04) with a bid size of 300 shares on NYSE. I quickly placed an order to sell with the smart route 300 shares, and the order wouldn't go through. I noticed it was routed to Island mysteriously--as the bid was on NYSE, and plus it almost always goes to NYSE. About 7 seconds later, the bid was taken out by another party, and the bid dropped by about $.30. Only then would my order be switched from Island to NYSE. A) Can someone please explain to me what happened? B) Is this the breaks of the game?
You get more attention on this board, in part because other parties can then confirm or deny having the same experience. Nevertheless, would IB customer service be able to confirm the incident through some type of audit trail? Note: I left the issue yesterday after the original posting, because I saw IB had their hands full with that rumor on Yahoo, but yes, I would definitely want other people's feedback.
OptionTrader, Audit Trail has its bugs too. I have seen an order sitting in the main screen as well as in the pending page; but audit trail does not seem to capture that order. I did contact CSR with no resolution. That does not mean yours would not get resolved by the CSR if you can get hold of them.
Well, it could be possible that someone came in bid .30 cents higher on NYSE, but that probably will trigger an LRP on that $20 stock, and the market goes into "slow". That bid will be sold before you even think about selling it probably. But the bid will stay there, even though you can't sell it, until the specialist pushes the "fast market" button again. And that's probably the reason why your order got routed to ISLD. Because ISLD was the "real" best bid at that time! -SL
So you're saying that smart route to an exchange which is on "slow"? The reality is that the order did go through for someone; why can't the smart route at least "try"?
No, smart will route an ECN when the NYSE quote is on slow! In your case it was to ISLD. I'm sure SMART definately tried to sell the NYSE bid, but in your case it was already sold, but the bid remaines, although it's not tradeable anymore, until the specialist hits the "fast market"button again. As soon as the specialist puts the stock back into fast mode, his NYSE bid will dissapear. -SL
Thanks SL, but this was different; see below: This is the initial answer from IB: OK. so here is the deal. We first routed the order to NYSE and believe it or not, NYSE rejected the order. We were then forced to route to another destination. We tried to hit NYSE a couple of times, and was consistently rejected. We are calling NYSE right now to see if they can tell us why on earth they would have rejected this order. We double checked time and sales and it shows NYSE with a 20.04 bid at the time we placed the order. I'll let you know what we find out.
Okay. Indeed, it seems like there was another problem. I thought you were trying to sell a NYSE bid when an LRP gets hit. Which happens a lot. Like on LEH when it rallied 6 bucks a few minutes after the open a few days ago. And on V yesterday. Well, I hope they can figure out what the problem was. Let me know when you got an answer from IB! Good luck, -SL
During the slow market all automatic executions are unavailable. You cannot hit bid/take offer if a quote stamped as slow (E,F, or U in quote condition in the feed). That's the reason why NYSE was rejecting the orders.