I use IB and the crossed prices for the last 30 min today was nuts. Is this the brokers or the ecn's fault, any particular one? A year ago I didn't notice it as much but seems if activity picks up it happens. Anyone able to shed some light on this? When it happens with a nyse I will put the symbol on the page with nyse routing selected instead of smart and that always fixes the problem, but with nasdaq what can be done?
It's the ECN's fault. ARCA in particular. I have another datafeed which is not IB and the crossed quotes on Level II was the same.
This was a real problem for me too over the past few days. It's clearing becoming more of an issue. In OTC stocks, ARCA has been delinked from Supermontage as stocks have been migrated to ArcaEx, so what we are left with is an even more fragmented market. However to look at it another way, it does make cross exchange arb on OTC stocks possible, if you are a quick on the trigger, daytrader type I get the feeling the SEC will step in soon however, or some consolidation of the ECNs (Nasdaq buying ARCA?) will ease the "problem".