wh-wh-why would anyone trade AMEX? even the brokers are leaving in droves. but they bought themselves back - who knows, maybe they have a plan. Would hate to see the place turned into condos (though they would most certainly be more affordable than if the NYSE were turned into condos).
I remember once at the open I sent a clearly erroneous order for TTH to exit my position at the 9:30 open. My Limit order erroneous by 5 points on 4000 shares. I placed the order through Arca, so I called Arca for a bust. It ended up that the 2k shares executed through the ARCA ECN and they busted it on the spot. The other 2k shares routed out to AMEX. The trades stood by those bunch of crooks. My personal experiences with AMEX is that they do everything they can to screw the average trader when the opportunity arises, whether it be backpocketing your order and locking your cancel/replace until the mkt is against you or allowing erroneous trades to stand in their favor. Maybe you have had better luck than I, but I refuse to send anything their way and I do not expect that to change anytime soon.
hmap: Busts are generally based on price at which you were filled, not your limit price. Because TTH is not all that liquid, I assume the spec took it up a little before filling you, but I doubt it was 5 points (or even 0.50), was it? If it was more than 1%, something went wrong in the dispute process - even AMEX specs have to be _somewhat_ reasonable. A limit order that's marketable by 20% is really no different than a market order in this case. My experience with AMEX has been pretty bad, too, on the rare occasion I have to trade an AMEX stock and there is no liquidity for it on the ECNs (usually with oil stocks). It seems the best bet if you are not trading too much size (say < 0.1% ADV) is to try to get a piece of the opening print, which is where most of the liquidity seems to be, and where the spec hopefully has less influence.
I looked up my trading from that period to find out the true erroneous prints. It was $2.80 away from mkt price. On that day, the market prints traded at 9:30:01 ..many prints...my trades went through at 9:30:07. Then at 9:30:08, more regualer market prints executed. Mine were clearly erroneous and Arca saw it and busted their portion on the spot. AMEX took me for the usual ride. Nothing was driven up at that monent. There was liquidity on AMEX. They just backed away.
That mirrors my experience. I never trade AMEX for that reason. I suspect, this why why NASD moved QQQ to the NASDAQ market. My test involved buy and selling 100 shares of SPY and QQQ at the market. In 10 out of 10 cases I got the worst possible fill over the next minute. stay away.
I just saw some garbage prints go on the open on AMEX if my eyes and data feed are correct the specialist over there printed $102 in SLV ... funny stuff since the market was trading on ECN's at least 50 cents lower just before the opening
Not exactly "trading" on the ECNs - there was all of 700 shares printed 09:15-09:30 and another 1200 during the 09:30 minute before the AMEX open on 24,200 shares (and another 7K or so printed on the third market). Was there anywhere near that size available on the ECNs within $1 of those 101.4x prints? Given the illiquidity of the futures, if someone wanted to buy 20-30K shares, I'd want at least a $0.50 gap to protect myself, particularly since the futures had just dropped to an apparent support level. I'm looking at SLV right now (~09:51 ET). With the inside market around 101.55, you'd have to go up to 102.30 to get a total of even 5K shares on the ECNs (and some of that might not be there any more once you start taking offers).
I got stuck on XLE today when AMEX went down. That was real nice. What do you do when your orders don't go through? PRAY?
alanm ... thanks for taking the time to answer me in a logical manner ... I guess this could have happened on NYSE too. a gap higher opening ... and the specialist is protecting himself and at the same time providing liquidity without having known the full size of the "book" in the futures ... it would be hard to speculate what price SLV should have opened at.