Word For Word: Bob Gasser, chief executive of agency brokerage Investment Technology Group, spoke with Traders Magazine about some of the issues ITG was grappling with. Here are three

We saw a couple of patterns emerging amongst the brokers in the system. First, they parse every order down to very small size, and that is really not POSIT. POSIT is about block liquidity. Second, the time in which they would rest inside the system was infinitesimally small. And, third, the trade sizes were very small. Now, one of the things that was attractive to us when we were considering their access to POSIT was reciprocal access to their pools. But what we found was that we would go into those pools with big block orders, rest for a period of time and then get hit with 100 share executions. We'd get hit 100, 100, 100, nothing. And we also found that we could reach those guys in LeveL, BIDS, Millennium and all the other places. So, the value of that reciprocal access was de minimis. I wasn't happy with POSIT and the way it was being negatively affected in terms of average daily volumes. It was that notion of being dis-intermediated-of not controlling access to POSIT and then having liquidity siphoned away from us.