Introduction
Generally speaking, it is never the numbers or figures that make the equities transaction market work but the people involved in the market make it work. Market makers are high networth folks who can put their resources together and push-up the capital market. Stock markets are not non-profit organizations staffed by social workers paid by the government to provide a public service. Brokers, specialists, and market makers don’t participate in the markets for their health. They trade only when they expect to make profits. Those profits are the price that investors and other traders pay in order to execute their orders when they want to trade.  The most common price for referencing stocks is the last trade price, but the last price is not necessarily the price that a person can subsequently trade now or in the future. At any given moment during market hours, there is a best or highest bid price from someone that wants to buy the stock and there is a best or lowest ask price from someone that wants to sell the stock.
In every transaction one party is a price setter and the other party is a price taker. The price taker agrees to the price set by the price setter. In financial markets, a person who places a market order is effectively a price taker (a market sell order will be filled at the prevailing best bid price and a market buy order will be filled at the best ask price). A person who places a limit order is a price setter while a person who places a market order crosses the spread and effectively incurs a cost of half the spread. The person who placed the limit order captures that half spread. The risk for the person who places a limit order is that the order never gets filled because the price is never met.

Mode of Operation
When transacting large orders, the market maker operates in the hope that the opposing party has finished transacting in that stock or that he has charged enough of a price concession to make up for any subsequent price impact from additional trades. But if the completed order is only part of a larger decision to buy more shares, the market maker can lose money as the additional buying pressure causes the stock to rise further.
Of course, one would all make the correct choice if we knew in advance what was going to happen. Therefore, the motivation for the trade must be considered when deciding whether to place a market order or a limit order. If the order is not time sensitive a limit order may end up costing less, but a market order may be the only way to get an order filled if the order is time sensitive and the price moves against you.
Institutional investors face the challenge of completing massive orders (often millions of shares) at a minimum cost. An institutional investor that exposes an order for a large number of shares can expect the price to jump immediately, so they may instead attempt to gradually work the order in small pieces over several days or weeks. Day traders will frequently try to buy or sell in advance of large working institutional orders if they can identify a large order in progress.  The purpose of a market is to provide a location where buyers and sellers can transact. The more buyers and sellers at any given time, the more efficient a market will be in matching buyers and sellers with minimum effort and costs.
Stakeholder’s Perspective of Market Makers
Alh. Rashidi Yussuff, the Chairman, Association of Stock Broking Houses of Nigeria, said that there is no magic that market makers would perform in the Nigerian stock market and more so they are just like a major distributors stabilising the market and ensure that the products get to the retailer.
According to him, “Market makers would buy the bulk of shares from different companies, while those who are not buoyant enough can always purchase from them. Its not that as their name implies, they are going to boost the market. They cannot create a special or different market price.
“The SEC previously got the whole idea wrong by talking about capitalization but the new ideal introduced now by the authority of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) that any broker can be a market maker. But for you to be a marker maker, you must have been seeing at the NSE handling the trading activities. You must have a proven record of buying and selling large volumes of shares”.
On the impact of the market makers on the continuous bearish trend in the capital market, Alhaji Yussuff stated that the essence of instituting the market makers is for bulk transactions and when there is no such, they are no longer making market. They cannot perform unless there is relative stability in the market unless the brokers are actively trading. The brokers cannot provide that velocity because they don’t have quantum. That is what everybody should focus on as there is no liquidity in the market.
Generally, the more liquid the stock the smaller the spread. If a security has a spread of several percentage points, an investor or trader attempting to make money would have to get several percentage points of price movement just to break even on a trade using market orders. Day traders tend to trade in very liquid stocks that have very small spreads.  A difference between a professional market maker and a day trader might be that a day trader will generally open a trade and immediately try to reverse the trade while a market maker will not immediately try to reverse each trade. Over the course of the day the market maker will try to balance his book, but he will generally have more capital available and is more concerned with the average of many trades than concentrating on each individual trade during the day.
Mr. Kasimu Garba Kurufi, the managing director/chief executive of APT Securities and Funds Ltd, affirmed that the market makers issues are still under processing and that they are not operational now. Since their institution they have been working out modalities on how to improve the market which is expected to commence operation early before end of this year. The structure of the market makers if not properly completed will never work adequately. And one of the modalities to make the operation work is by encouraging both the primary and secondary market makers to actively involve in the operation. This is because all over the world, where we have the leading and developed market, there used to be market makers with great impacts of market development. Although this cannot be achieved in isolation, it has to work concurrently with securities lending which guideline is now out. With this in place, there would be a tremendous volumes, transactions and development in the equity sector of the NSE. The window for taking-in and out would be jointly provided for with adequate monitoring.
Mr. Motolani Oduwole, the chief executive of Molten Trust Limited, posited that the market makers have not commenced operations yet. They are currently having their weekly meeting to facilitate a good way of making market. On modalities set in place to make market, he stated that: “We are waiting for their modalities to see how they want to put it at work. The market is responding to the situation in the macro economy and as long as the yield on money market instruments and bonds is concerned, some of them are beyond 15 per cent per annum and the investors in the equity market except for security reasons that some should be given dividends that will commensurate with the yields on the money market because yields are rising in the money market. For this reason liquidity is flowing in the money market and not to the capital market. However some stocks that have strong fundamentals will return high yield during good liquidity in the market. Fixing the market requires macro-economic remedy needing that it goes beyond the  authority of the stock exchange, capital market operators can single-handedly play because it is a wide macro-economic issue.

Conclusion
A financial analyst who craved anonymity once said that the market makers were registered only by the SEC and not by the NSE because of the need to change the framework of operation aiming at achieving a desired target of bringing back the capital market and restore it to be more effective and vibrant.