don't get me started on pipeline. they charge half a cent. and their commercials are full of lies. leak proof block trading my rear. Here's the short version of my story. I figured out how to game it, I was making a mint. Pipeline's customer(s) called to complain. (we're not making money any more... someone is taking advantage of us blah blah blah) Pipeline called us whining... They took away our access to the block board. I got the block board from a third party. I got to trade pipeline for one more day. And then pipeline cut our connection. I traded on a pipeline for a grand total for 2.5 days. 1.5 days in June of 2006 and 1 day in July of 2006. The market is not efficient, not fair and pretty much a total joke. - mnx
I also have extensive experience with nyfix millennium and knight. I wasn't the one placing the large orders though, I was attempting to fill them. (i am a prop trader after all). Eventually the other side got sick of crappy fills on miln and started chopping up their orders into small pieces, showing up at random times. They also quit using market orders. lol I also got my prop firm kicked off knight as well... That only took like 4 days... It was fun while it lasted. - mnx
What is the exact selling point of dark pools? In other words why would you want to route (limit orders) to these places when you have less of a chance of getting filled? Or, is that the point...?
Sorry to hear your experience was poor with Pipeline. Had thought what you were trying to do is what people are trying to avoid when accessing dark pools? Not sure how easy it is to see all the bids and offers, but it sounds like Pipeline does let particpants see prices and size. Some place won't let people send false orders which are immediately pulled (I think they call this "pinging" a dark pool). My interest is just to see if better quality fills are available for less liquid markets, essentially finding counterparties in similar situation to take our size at levels we can live with. I'm not happy with the $0.02/share cost some of these places offers. (ATD currently doesn't charge us anything, but we get some fills with slippage we would like to avoid.) Thanks to everyone for their posts, and please post if you have anything to say about the various dark pools out there you have used. It would be good to hear about people's experiences with these pools vs. doing trades DMA or with a standard algorithmic broker.
the point is to match large buyers and sellers without impacting the market. eg. Instution A has to buy 1 million shares of ABC. If they start doing it on the open market, the price will go up huge. However if Instution B has to sell 1 million shares of ABC the could both put the orders on a dark pool and match in between the spread. Zero slippage.... - mnx
I have a great story about ATD, and a prop firm that stole my money too... man I'll have to save that one for later when I have some time to type it out..... that one is really unbelieveable... - mnx
mnx, if you're not open to posting publically you could always PM me. Happy to hear stories. That thread about crazy stories from CME/CBOT guys was too much fun to read... But, I think I recognized a couple of people involved in those stories. I've always worked upstairs since getting in the business so I missed out on all the silliness. I did hear about CBOT guys bidding on a clerk running around some pit within some time on her last day clearking in August a few years back. She was a college sprinter and so there were bets between the neighboring pits on what time she would make. Supposedly she did it in a good time, got fined (her group paid the fine) but that was okay since she was headed back to college that weekend. Thx.
here is the ATD story. I opened up an account with a prop firm called posittrade. (http://www.positradeinc.com/) (go figure their website isn't even working...) I put up 10k and started trading. I was trading knight and made some decent cash. I decided to try out ATD. I quickly discovered that 99% of the time they would fill me on the bid or ask for 100 shares. So I found some really thin stocks, I'd place a low offer buy on ATD @ the ask, move the stock up by placing bids and then sell higher at the bid via ATD again. I made like 5k doing this one afternoon. @ 3:50 that day I noticed I ATD was no longer accepting orders... Got an e-mail that night saying that ATD has a rule which doesn't allow you to place orders on the same side on the same symbol within 30s. (This is documented no where by the way. I spent hours searching). The prop firm told me that in their contract with ATD it said that any profits made in violation of the 30s rule would need to be paid back. I asked to see the relevant portion of the contract and they refused... Eventually I close my account. I should have gotten back my deposit plus some profits... Except I only get back 30% of my initial deposit... They fudged the numbers and made up all kinds of BS to steal my money. Initially they clamied that I owed ATD 8000$. And that it would be split ~(4k me, 4k them). When I went to close my account this amount jumped to 12k and I was responsible for the whole thing. Also they deducted $5915 and called that "Losses incurred to other traders as a result of our ATD connection being cut due to your violations." When I asked questions like why has the amount jumped from 8k to 12k and what exactly does losses incurred to other traders mean they couldn't give an explanation... They kept stating BS in the contract that they can deduct whatever they want... etc etc. bunch of crooks. moral of the story... avoid small prop firms!!!!! I cannot stress this enough. Now that I've told the story, I might post another copy in it's own thread... Don't want any one else to get taken advantage of by those guys... - mnx