Matt Levine, Columnist

Merrill Lynch's Secret Stock Deals

Also seating charts, toys, kidnappings and bond market liquidity.

March 26, 2018 at 2:14 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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If you want to buy stock and you are a customer of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, you give BAML an order and it gives you back the stock. You might not care where it gets the stock, but you might; if you are a serious enough stock trader you probably do. There are a bunch of places where it could get the stock, but there are two big obvious categories. One place is: the stock exchanges. BAML could take your order to buy 100 shares of XYZ, go out to the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq or wherever, buy 100 shares, and deliver them to you. In the simplest form, if a stock is quoted on the major stock exchanges with a highest bid of $10.00 and a lowest offer of $10.01, and you send BAML an order to the effect of "just buy me 100 shares," BAML will go buy 100 shares at the offer -- $10.01 -- and deliver them to you for $1,001, plus a commission.