Its technical term is "Marking the close" do some research. There was an ETF trader that had some pretty hefty fines when he got caught doing this. Main thing is not to make it a habit.
Marking the close is the illegal act of bidding up the value of a fund's holdings right before the end of a quarter, when the fund's performance is measured. This is done by placing a large number of orders on existing holdings, which drives up the value of the fund.
hehe, yes definitely, i'm sure the programmers who created the highly sophisticated automated trader-tracking-profiling-stat program would decide that the best implementation would be a keystroke macro. as the nyse moves to hybrid a lot of the order filling will be done by algos. but for the most part it's still being done manually and has been for a long time. if it's not the specialist it's his clerk. your info is wrong. like hydro said, the unique identifier shows the clearing firm. a bit suprised he thinks they can single out "the daytraders", since most clearing firms also host buyside instis and hedgies as well as trading firms. you know how many different organizations clear through penson, slk, gs, etc? maybe in the past when there were less buyside/hedge fund algos slowly plucking away at liquidity all day, the specialist could tell the difference... now though, different game. unless, of course, it's a very thin stock and you're being obvious in your behaviour... but otherwise there's no way a specialist is gonna know it's "you". unless he has some sort of crystal ball... maybe the same one that tells him you routed to an ecn? how about actually doing a bit of research before posting assumptions as facts guys? http://hybridtalk.nyse.com/archives/2006/03/debunking_lump.php
Thanks for the pointers. However I do know for a fact that when a NYSE specialist lodges a complaint, the trade can be tracked to the exact trader or traders who were involved. I know this because a couple of guys in my firm got kicked out for spoofing and a few more got warnings for collusion on thin stocks. As I stated before, every single order received by the Specialist has a unique identifier tagged to it.
They can track it back to the trader. Go into PD and send lots for 99 shares in rapid fire right before the stock is about to tank, and see if you get a call by your firm or the specialist by lunch. I don't suggest it by the way.
9000 keystrokes a minute = 150 keystrokes per second (average). Not just amazing, its impossible, by at least one order of magnitude. I call BS on this.
putz, read the original question, and read how you replied. your previous answer and even now are still implying the spec knows who you are in realtime. you're wrong here putz. you could always just go talk to your manager and get the facts before replying with half facts that you don't really understand. you are right though that every order the specialist sees has a unique identifier attached, but it aint unique to you. your homework is to find out who it's unique to. extra credit is to answer the original posters question correctly. chaos, right. but where were we talking about order tracking? the topic is about can the spec see me on the bid and knows it's me and is tracking my moves bs. where in what i wrote in response to that, contradict order audits? btw, don't think the speicialist is gonna be picking up the phone anytime soon to call you about your 99s. your firm, yes. the spec, no. gts, don't think they were talking about individual specialists. the 4M number is probably a cumulative for a specific firm. if you check out the link i gave above, looks like they're quoting around 40M exchange wide.