Brent, to answer your ASFX & some brokerages situation...
I had researched this years ago and I don't have my notes in front of me on this so bare with me on what I can remember. I also made this post on a few other stocks so it might not be new to some people.
Someone I spoke to at Ameritrade & Schwab in the past kind of let the cat out of the bag unexpectedly as to why they sometime stop online trading to force you to have to call in to place a buy order. Ameritrade and Schwab currently have no restriction on ASFX, but Scottrade does. Still, here’s what I remember being told.
There exists what is known as the "Custodian of Accounts" on the side of the brokerage companies and on the side of the Market Makers (MMs). They are responsible for verifying and coordinating the electronic inventory of shares as transactions are monitored for buying and selling.
Whenever there is a shortage of shares or an extremely low inventory of shares available for the public to buy, the level of coordination for the dissemination of those shares have to be monitored that much more closely to make sure there is not an issue during the settlement time frame of T+3 days. This means that the “legitimate” inventory of ASFX shares is either at zero or about to hit zero for that particular Custodian of Account’s inventory of shares. With the inventory being zero to negative, this means that a log of shares sold to an investor must be kept that contributed towards the MMs trying to create or maintain an orderly market and must be tracked for a known amount to be covered in the future. That’s why we sometimes see the huge spreads too on low volume.
Since there is a known shortage within the inventory of shares for ASFX, imagine what would happen if I put in an order to buy 5 million shares through TD Ameritrade and at the same time you put in an order to buy 5 million shares of ASFX through Scottrade. Now imagine that only 5 million shares are remaining in the complete or total "inventory of shares" within the MMs “Custodian of Accounts” to disseminate from their inventory of ASFX shares.
Since the MMs inventory of ASFX shares is so small, having transactions happening all at once could cause an imbalance or negative balance of shares to never be "officially" covered. Forcing investors to call in creates a more in depth and finite way of streamlining the control of ordering shares from the inventory to one at a time to make sure the inventory issue does not get out of hand.
Imagine in the example above what would happen if they authorized electronic purchasing as usual and allowed the 5 million share buy to go through at both Ameritrade and Scottrade. That would be a total of 10 million shares bought of ASFX, but keep in mind that the MMs only had an inventory of ASFX shares from their “Custodian of Accounts” of 5 million shares. When T+3 days come around, who do the MMs give the 5 million shares of ASFX to for covering; Ameritrade or Scottrade? This could create an issue at the Clearing Houses as all trades have to be settled. There would be a 5 million share imbalance of ASFX shares unsettled.
This shows me that if significant "buying" volume comes into ASFX, there might be a major problem for the brokerage companies and the MMs for having a shortage of shares to create an orderly market for ASFX. To fix the problem, the MMs would have to seriously increase the bid to entice enough selling until they capture enough shares out of the open market to maintain order. We should be heading up in a huge way if I had to guess as more and more people realize all of ASFX’s potential. I’m still sticking to this post for DD on ASFX’s potential: http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=31260339
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