Steve Forbes: Al, good to have you with us. Can you define the business of Pipeline?  Al Berkeley III: Pipeline is in the business of hiding institutional orders from predatory traders.  Now this almost sounds like exchange version or financial version of the cat and mouse game of the Cold War. Can you elaborate a little bit on investors, speculators, pools of liquidity and how you fit in?  Yes, I'd be glad to. You know, Wall Street is one of the fascinating games that's ongoing every day and you've got some very bright boys and girls who are trying to figure out what the other one's going to do before they do it. And they deploy a lot of very fast computers and a lot of very sophisticated pattern recognition software. And what they're looking for is an unfilled, large order that they can either go gather those shares and sell it to that person at a slightly higher price, not unlike scalping a ticket at a ballgame. Or, there's an even more sophisticated game called adverse selection, where if they can predict that the stock's going to go up, they will stop selling to you. If they can predict that a stock's likely to go down, they will go ahead and sell to you.  So that you, looking back, you're saying, "Gosh, I wish I hadn't bought that." Or, "I wish I had bought that." But the other guy always seems to have gotten a better trade.  Now the whole thing is described as ferreting out inefficiencies. But really, what it really is, is an intelligence game. Figuring out what the other guy's doing, then beating him to the punch and getting a profit from it.  It's very much like a chess game. You're exactly right.  And so Pipeline, you know, whose side are you on then?
Pipeline Chairman Al Berkeley tells Steve Forbes about why blocks of stock need to be considered differently by the SEC.