Replies to post #149956 on Sino Agro Food Inc (fka SIAF)

[Redbull84]

Yes, you won't be able to see any bids below 500?

[Traderfan]

Not that I care about that single share being filled in this case, but such nonsense doesn't happen on Merkur. Is it a glitch, MMs playing around, or does OTC work differently than Merkur?

No it's not a glitch. It's totally normal, happens all the time and on almost all stocks nowadays. Any bid or ask that is hidden (meaning below the threshold size to be shown on level2 which is 2500 shares at a stock between 0.20 and 0.5099, will usually not get filled anymore, even if there is a million shares filled lower or higher. A few years ago there were stocks that basically filled every single hidden bid or ask as if it was normal and other stocks that almost never filled them. I worked a lot with these hidden orders for years and it was really different between certain stocks that I traded. Slowly this turned around to less and less stocks that did these fills and within the last 12 months or so they almost totally stopped filling anything that is hidden. It occasionally still happens but very rarely.

6 months ago some MM's started to not except any orders anymore below the threshold if you wanted to put them above or below the current bid/ask, can you imagine this? So for example if you had 2000 shares left of a stock trading at 25x28 cents and you wanted to put yourself right below that ask to sell you couldn't do it. What you could have done is to directly sell these 2000 shares into the bid at 25 cents but you couldn't put it up above the bid into an ask. I had these situations at IB and I complained a lot about it, fortunately they implemented other additional MM's then for routing.