      The practice of stopping market orders help to maintain an orderlymarket and are one of the methods used by the specialist in maintaining asize balance between the quoted bid and ask. Stopping stock can also helpreduce short-run price reversals. In quarter-point markets, for example, aseries of rapidly arriving buy and sell market orders would, in the absenceof any stops, result in a sequence of transactions at successive 1/4 pointvariations. In such situations, stopping market orders would result in mosttransactions being executed inside the quote, benefiting both the buy andsell market orders.