From TradeStation today: 10/17/02 Attention Equities Brokerage Customers - Important Stop Order Information - UPDATE On October 8th, Merrill Lynch (MLCO) announced the closure of their New Jersey operations, formerly Herzog, Heine, Geduld (HRZG). As a result, we are currently unable to accept or route any stop orders for NASDAQ stocks. We considered many options and have decided to develop proprietary functionality within the TradeStation Order Execution Network that will enable us to offer Stop Market and Stop Limit orders again. This will be accomplished by 'holding' placed stop orders on our servers until their respective stop prices have been penetrated by prevailing market activity. Once a Stop Market or Stop Limit order's stop price has been penetrated, the order will be considered elected (triggered) and the order will be routed into the marketplace as a Market order or a Limit order respectively. Developing our own solution will also have additional benefits. We will end our reliance on a third party for stop order functionality and will give us the ability to offer ground breaking new and unique stop functionality (i.e. stop orders for routes that natively do not support stop orders, use of additional advanced order options, etc). Development and thorough testing of this solution will take time. We expect to have this functionality ready by January. ----------------------------------------- I sure hope they do a better job on this than IB... --Derek
Does this mean that merrill shut down the entire herzog operation? If so, what was the whole point of buying them in the first place?