|
Unusual prices in the T&S windowSometimes you will notice unusual prices in your T&S window that are way outside of the current inside market. Let’s assume you notice a recent trade being made at $80.50 which is $7 away from the current inside market. This could have happened for two reasons: One would be if you entered a buy order thru ISLD, with a limit of 80.50 or higher, you would actually get executed at that price and your trade would appear in the T&S information. Remember: ISLD and other execution systems look for the best available (the cheapest) market participant and seek execution. So, since they can only seek execution from market participants they can actually “communicate with”. In this example, let’s say the best available ISLD offer was at $80.50. 80.50$ would be the best price available thru ISLD thus the discrepancy with the “real” best available price. If you ever get into a situation like this and you obviously entered an order “by mistake”, try calling your broker immediately and report your mistake. Your broker might be able to “reverse” that trade for you. Another reason for unusual prices could have been a late report. The exchanges have a certain time limit to report trades. Therefore, this trade could have been made earlier and is reported now. Usually trades are reported immediately though. Trades way out of the current market can be a pretty big problem in charts. Imagine our example above the high of the stock would suddenly be $80.50 even though this might have been the only trade in this area. On the chart, you would see a big and sudden spike. If you haven’t followed the stock and watched the T&S it is difficult and time consuming to find out, if it was just a single trade causing this high or if bid and ask actually where that high. What I usually do is to look at the 1 min chart; if the unusual price happened within a 1 min timeframe, l can be pretty sure that it was just a single trade, since the stock would have never moved that much within just one minute. Some chart platforms actually filter those trades, which is very helpful since trades outside of the market occur all the time. OK, enough about this. Now let's jump into the NASDAQ order routing systems |
