"They" can also turn your monitor into a camera and see in your room! Just kiddin'. Yeah, that old market knows just how to hurt ya...
If your stop is where probably 99% of everyone else's is, namely 2 ticks below major support or above resistance, then yes. They can see it a mile away.
maybe your stop loss is too tight maybe your entry isn't the best. maybe a wider stop and/or better entry
It has happened to me in my Fidelity account. It just went down or up enough to trigger my stop loss or stop cover order. My order was not so tight. One dollar range. I have not seen that happen in IB. I think it depends how your broker acts on your order. He can pre-submit your order so no one will see your order and actually your order will not be in the system. If they submit it, then market makers can see it and it is compleletely legal what they do.
Human nature. I try to think about stops like this imaginary scenaro: Your back in college, the professor writes your trade (entry) on the board ... Then he pops a quiz to his 100 students and asks them: "where do you put your stop?" He gathers the results and finds out that the majority of the class put their stops in the same place! ... at round numbers ... just below/above support or the low/high ... etc. After years of testing students ... the professor forms a fund, maybe arbing the indexes to the underlying, and realizes he can extract a certain level of gain by exploiting this behavioral tendency and taking out the stops. So, experiment. Maybe, try putting half your position on, then enter the other half at exactly where your stop would be. Tricky, because a stop turns to a market, so a limit enter on the opposite side may not behave exactly as predicted. And, yes, if everybody starts thinking like this then the professor will figure it out again and exploit it. "... see which way the herd is running and go the other way" 2 cents
No. I dont enter round numbers. I used to put it just below what i intend to put 9.99 Then I started going down and down and still it manages to hit that. Sometimes I have seen stocks coming down 5-10 % to take out my order and then go up where I knew they would eventually go. All the prediction and good pick was wasted :-( Now that you point out I have also noticed that my Ameritrade account has bigger problem than MBTrading. (Anything to do with the fact that Ameritrade account is marked as pattern day trade so its on their radar?) Any solutions? I dont have time to sit in front of PC and monitor and use "mental stops".