September 20, 2009
Do you know why all these nonsense about flash order really started? EDGX the ecn introduced these orders a while back calling them something arcane. Customer brokers actually liked these orders a lot for 200 or 300 shares because they saved routing charges there by saving their customers money. EDGX ended up taking order flow from Nasdaq and BATS. In response Nasdaq and BATS invented their own orders respectively called flash and BOLT and started their campaign to ban these orders.