Research Pit

[Jagman]

Good post for those that ever look at I-Watch, I agree it's probably more of a "contra indicator" from my experience with it:

Re: Thompson = reverse indicator
by: keatone (26/M/Newton, MA) 02/18/03 03:11 pm
Msg: 144950 of 462747

(1) The primary driver for their graph comes from Autex, A Thompson Financial Services Product - I know them well I have three Autex machines on our trading desk at work.
(2) Autex is an intra-broker advertising system. It allows Broker/Dealers to indicate Buy or Sell "advertisements" to other Autex owners.
(3) They ARE NOT firm bids or offers like they are in Instinet. They are only advertisements of interest.
(4) The advertiser, if they want, can show bids/offers of over 50,000 shares in a separate window called "Supers".
(5) MANY firms use Autex as a smoke screen. IF I was a size seller I may post a size BUYER to determine if other sellers are outside of me. When other sellers call me I could just say sorry that's an old message. I cleaned up my buy side a few minutes ago. Then I sell like Hell knowing another large seller is out there also.
(6) MANY firms use AUTEX as a means to drum up business. On a Up day for EBAY, buyers are looking for stock. I could post in Autex as a seller, almost guaranteeing a call (even though I have no stock to sell). I tell the caller "I just cleaned up my seller. He's been reloading at 50,000 per clip. Let me work your order for a few minutes and get ahold of my seller". Then you shop the order like hell all over Wall Street and try to find a seller. Its called "getting involved" on the street.
(7) Note that large Sell interests (Supers) were indicated again and again and the stock kept going up. this tells me somebody was posting as a size seller to fish out an order and that a large seller probably never existed.

These are just my observations. Autex is NOT a firm Bid/Offer system. It is my experience that 70+% of the "advertisements" are actually people either fishing or actually working in the opposite direction of their advertisement and trying to find the competition. I would take the I-Watch data with a BIG grain of salt. I would go so far as to use it as a contra indicator. When it shows large sell, I would guess that 60-70% of the time it is actually better to buy. Also note that ALL of the indications are institutional. No retail order flow is advertised on Autex.


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