Specialist

A firm that keeps a "fair and orderly market" in certain stocks. Specialists on the New York Stock Exchange floor hold an inventory of certain stocks and buy them when there are no buyers and sell them when there are no sellers.

Features

• Already, people who went about as market producers on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) were called specialists.
• The settlement required the specialist firms to pay more than $240 million in punishments and disgorgement for their job in benefitting from trading opportunities to the detriment of their public customers.
• Specialists were responsible for facilitating the trade of a given stock by selling their own stock inventory when there was a large shift in demand, in this way guaranteeing market liquidity.
• These people are presently alluded to as designated market creators (DMM).
• In 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) settled a case against five specialist firms that were blamed for disregarding federal securities laws.