[Your Mom]

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There are a few things that could be done that would help the retail investor. Getting rid of Reg NMS would be a start. Blowing up the AMEX would help too . . .

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Can you explain these two parts?

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Reg NMS are new regulations in place that determine how orders have to be handled and executed by market makers. There are several exceptions that market makers can use to trade thru the normal retail order. The biggest scam exception that the listed exchanges (NYSE and AMEX) use is the Slow Quote exception. The NYSE or AMEX will go into what they call slow quote mode and then they are able to trade through your order even if your order is part of the NBBO (National Best Bid or Offer). Here's the definition of a slow market according to the NYSE:

The market becomes “slow” or converts temporarily from a Hybrid Market to an auction market so as to
enable specialists, floor brokers and customers to interact with quotes and orders manually, with the objective
of enhancing liquidity, reducing volatility and discovering price. Certain market conditions temporarily trigger
a slow market, including gap quotes, trading halts or reaching LRPs. The slow market can be traded through.

In other words, they can go to slow quote mode whenever they want which enables them to do whatever they want. What a [censored] joke.

As for why the AMEX sucks, just trust me that they do. Their specialists do whatever they want, they don't honor their own quotes, their systems crash all the time, they just plain ass suck and I hate everything about them.