Another area under review is the "indications of interest, " which are similar to flash orders.
On July 24th Charles Schumer, a Democratic senator, urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to ban flash orders.
Requiring orders to be posted for at least a second would nullify the value of flash orders and of probing the market.
Flash orders have been used for years but have become increasingly popular in recent months as more traders and exchanges adopted the approach.
Now, partly thanks to flash orders, Direct Edge is the third-largest stock trading platform by matched volume in the country, according to Raymond James.
Flash orders were pioneered by the Chicago Board Options Exchange's stock exchange earlier this decade as that exchange looked for a way to improve execution speeds.
Flash orders, a type of order displayed on certain exchanges for less than 500 microseconds, expose information that is only valuable to those with the fastest computers.
Critics say flash orders give a select group of high-speed traders a window into the direction of the market, giving them the ability to trade at lightning speeds ahead of less fleet-footed investors.
Flash-order advocates say the orders help traders get better prices.
William O'Brien, chief executive of Direct Edge, makes no apologies for the practice, saying flash has gotten investors better prices on larger orders roughly 10% to 15% of the time.
Given that it will take one or two quarters for memory companies to reconfigure their factories to crank out more NAND flash memory, Handy argues, Apple's fresh orders should sop up enough capacity to keep prices steady, at least for now.
Last summer, Direct Edge was at the center of a controversy over so-called flash trading, in which users of its ECN are flashed unfilled orders for fractions of a second before those orders are routed out to rival exchanges.
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