Agreed. I've had better luck with ISE on my QQQ options than anywhere else. I avoid AMEX ... they are simply not honest (imho)
I should expand on what I meant in my post about MM being Pussies. Fortunately, I was intoxicated when it was posted so my thought process was rapidly expanding into unkown realms. I agree with what Def has to say about banks caring. They don't want to lose anymore money than the next guy and they are just as big crybabies as well. To further his point about ISE bid honoring practices as being good customer service, banks and big trading firms see EVERYONE as a customer. The number one priority in a marketmaking firm is order flow. You keep the juicy trades for yourself and lay off the garbage wherever you can. As the typical firm on the ISE is more sophisticated than a trader on a floor, they have more confidence in their models. Nobody likes getting picked off no matter who you work for. As a phone clerk, I had one firm trader client which was purely pick off paper. The business actually sucked because it caused a degredaton in our relationships with the other firms involved. MMs remember these things when you ask to be let out of a trade of another CS. MMs have taken this fear of getting picked off to an extreme. Some view every BD order with suspicion. Some don't. I once had a BD client trying to HBOC. The MMs would never trade with the guy even though the markets were already the juiciest around. Others would call wanting to trade it but we would always caution them about the MMs unwillingness to trade non-CS flow. What I ended up doing was taking every order(even 5 lots) coming over the phone or wire, cutting the market and getting him to facilitate the order flow. It was a win win for me, the BD and CS. What drove me nuts on the floor was the inability to control my own markets. It was dictated by the DPM/LMM or the senior traders in the crowd. If you didn't go along with the crowd, you would get shut out. The CBOE is not an auction market; it is a negotiated market. I never cared whether it was a CS or BD I was trading with. In fact, I think that BD order flow is better because it offers an opportunity to trade in decent size. If your personal market is there, trade dam it! On the other hand, if your not there, you shouldn't be forced to trade by exchange rules or crowd influence.