A few years agon the SEC enacted the must show regulation... it was confusing because everyone thought that the ASK and BID would show the actual number of shares for a price on either side... the hidden part of the regulation was they only had to show the number of one trader... so if there is only one person who has a buy order in for 10K shares with that particular MM once the 10K is sold or bought that MM drops off ...but if that MM has multiple trads in the Q then once the 10K is sold they simply put up the next offer from the next trader and the MM remains but the offers change. The regulation needs to be change so that the MM must list the total of ALL offers... Also its up to the discretion of the MM they can if they chose list the total number of offers in their Q If you look at 0004 NITE has 27 million shares at 0004 Its safe to assume that those are not shares from just one person but the total from multiple offers... And yes your right its total bull shit that they can do that
Market Data 
Markets 
