February 8, 2018
As a stock trader my wish is to move trading of stocks in .001 cents not in .05 cents. I'm forced to sell $5. stocks like LOAN in large quantities in .05 increments when I witness trades going on in tenths of a cent. It's very frustrating.
BTW I think I know one main cause of the markets behavior Monday. Fidelity allows me to place a trailing sell order based only on a WHOLE percentage of the stock peak. So I have 3 accounts which held ITA and I placed a sell at 8% below it's high. Since it reached a high after I bought it in all three accounts the 8% below the high was the same amount and all three trades which occurred at the same time. Now if 1000s of other people did something similar, bingo, you've got your problem. BTW Fidelity holds onto that trade info internally until the condition is met, then does the trade. So it may look like huge insider trading when it's actually individuals using Fidelity's trailing %. One solution I requested of Fidelity is to allow 2 decimal places to the right of the decimal point like they do for trailing $.