For those gray-bearded former floor brokers who would gallop into an exchange specialist’s trading pit and shout, “I’ll buy what’s offered on the screen!”,  and were often dismayed when the specialist yelled back,  “Go ahead, trade with the screen..but I don’t have that offer anymore!”– you won’t be surprised to know that today’s “screen-based markets”, especially for the majority of ETF products, are not the panacea that electronic market promoters would have you believe.

Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, if one expects the ‘screen’ to be displaying the real liquidity that’s available.

To underscore that point, we’ve excerpted 2 minutes from the Catherine Cowdery and Pimm Fox Feb 29, Bloomberg Radio 20-minute podcast interview with ETF market specialist Andy McOrmond, the co-head of ETF Trading for liquidity aggregator WallachBeth Capital.

Before you (or after) you click on the logo above, what the extracted clip doesn’t include are the following and particularly poignant points that McOrmond made in the interview when speaking to the topic of ETF market liquidity and transparency of trading screens. Continue reading →