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Re: A deleted message

Tuesday, 07/14/2009 11:12:21 AM

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 11:12:21 AM

Post# of 15726
LOL, sorry, I did accidentally quote from one guy's post and attribute it to the other one. None of them are making any sense so they all blend together.

There is no such thing as "showing a buy as a sell," or vice versa. When a trade prints on the tape, there are two parties to it, a buyer and a seller. Sometimes one of the parties is a market maker; sometimes it's another individual whose trade is being reflected by a market maker. in a fast-moving market, when the bid and ask move between the time the order is placed and when it is executed, or between the time the trade is executed and when it prints, it can appear out of sequence or outside the current bid and ask. Simple as that.

When a trade is reported, there is no "buy" or "sell" designation, because each trade by definition has a buyer and a seller. There are some websites that purport to show how many trades were at the ask and how many were at the bid. Even on my Bloomberg terminal, when the bid/ask moves just before the trade prints, which is not uncommon, the software gets it wrong when determining whether the trade was at the bid, at the ask, or in between at the time it was made. If Bloomberg can't do that with people paying $2,000 a month for terminals, you can't expect the free websites to be able to do it accurately all the time, either.