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I find this a little unnerving. Odds are, the last stock I bought was from C3PO:

Program trading in the week ended Nov. 4 accounted for 56.7%, or an average of 1.08 billion shares daily, of New York Stock Exchange volume. Brokerage firms executed an additional 742.7 million daily shares of program trading away from the NYSE, with 1.4% of the overall total on foreign markets. Program trading is the simultaneous purchase or sale of at least 15 different stocks with a total value of $1 million or more.

Of the program total on the NYSE, 7.6% involved stock-index arbitrage. In this strategy, traders dart between stocks and stock-index options and futures to capture fleeting price differences. Less than 0.1% involved derivative product-related strategies. Index arbitrage can be executed only in a stabilizing manner when the Dow Jones Industrial Average moves 150 points or more from its previous day's close.

Some 53.7% of program trading was executed by firms for their clients, while 40.3% was done for their own accounts, or principal trading. An additional 6.1% was designated as customer facilitation, in which firms use principal positions to facilitate customer trades.

Of the five most-active firms overall for the week, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s Lehman Brothers Inc. and UBS AG's UBS Securities LLC executed most of their program trading as principal for their own accounts. Deutsche Bank AG's Deutsche Bank Securities, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley executed most of their program trading activity for customers, as agent.

Today’s a pretty quiet day on Wall Street. The bond market is closed for Veteran’s Day. The stock market’s volume is very low. There’s not much news from our Buy List. Dell (DELL) is trading up about 1%. St. Jude Medical (STJ) just got approval to buy Advanced Neuromodulation Systems (ANSI). For the record, this is not a mega-merger. St. Jude is more than 10 times as large as ANSI.

The Dow is within striking distance of 10700. The index has closed between 10200 and 10700 for 125 of the last 126 sessions.

Posted by edelfenbein at November 11, 2005 3:20 PM