Originally posted by reugen
reply to post by GreenBicMan
So from where does "dark liquidity" trades execute ? Off shore possibly, ok meh, never head the term before thats all. Thanks for your reply.
It can be hard to front run anything that executes just as fast as you, but many trading firms want to be close (physical close) to the stockexchange
so their "phiberoptic cables" dont have to be that long ... I would look across the street first if i were the FBI. ;-)
Dark Liquidity trades execute here.. but mainly prob in chicago where the CBOT servers are etc.
Well, here is the deal.
.01 ms is all it takes to front-run these trades
In fact, when GS says they have not been effected yet, they could be front running these from day 1 when they found out and just /powned these people
behind the scenes or are just playing a game with these people
GS has a .01ms faster hub to the exchange no doubt. But here is how this works.
In a "dark liquidity pool" buyers and sellers are matched 100% TOTALLY ANONYMOUS for large scale orders. Lets say INSTITUTION A wants to sell
10,000 contracts and they are looking for a buyer to match at their price. It is just a way for the HF's and big players to mask trades so they
don't have to be broken up in the "open market" where me and you play where they will suffer slippage, especially in non liquid markets where they
could pay a very hefty pricetag.
So lets say this.
Lets say I want to purchase 100 Dow Jones Futures Contracts at a market order overnight at 8,000.
I enter the BUY MARKET ORDER for 100 (the contract price is 8000)
But the order gets filled at 8008 for 50 and 8010 for 50 - this happens when either the market is thin like overnight, or when you are trading more
than 1,000 contracts at a time during the day (which pro's and inst. do easily)
Take in mind every point is 5 dollars.. so 50*8 and 50* 10 is a $900 smack in the face, and you start out in the hole that much money!
So you can see where dark liquidity pools are a good resource for big money players.
Now lets get back to this..
In these cases GS is prob. with about 99% certainty one of the biggest players in the pool. There are programs that look for volume and try to
"snipe" them and buy/sell in front or behind -
It is much more complicated than this of course, but basically in this marketplace there is so much "noise" going on, you try to "ping" the trades
and use something called VWAP to get a read on things..
Anyways, to the point, GS has programs I am 1000% sure that sniff these out, and when they know when their trades were supposed to execute they will
call the dark liq. owners and demand (and I am sure will get) the peoples info if they have not already - even though this is supposed to be 100%
anonymous of course.
I am out of breath lol, but if you want to know more just pm me
[edit on 9-7-2009 by GreenBicMan]