Quite strange it was. At 11:39:39 the NQ was at 1476.50. At 11:39:43 it was up to 1483.50. At 11:39:44 it was back down to 1474.50! That is what you call a real fast breakout failure pattern...
When I first saw it I was convinced it was either unfilled market orders or stop orders that had been executed, most likely by traders who had been unable to get out of their positions. And lo and behold IB sent out a bulletin about 2 mins later that trading through Globex had resumed. That's my theory anyway. It put an exclamation mark on the rally and formed a turning point. My graph shows about 3:35 PM Eastern.
The times I have mentioned were taken from T&S using IQFeed. This is part of the magic of using Medved Quotetracker. At the end of the day, you have every trade in your T&S so you can check out what really happened during the day. There were many trades going off during those few seconds and all were lots of different sizes like 1-2-3-4-8-9-10-15-16 ect. These trades all went off in the time span of 3 seconds. I don't think they had anything to do with program trading. It might of been some kind of data feed anamoly. As the prices went up, the bid ask didn't change untill the last trade at 1483.50. Then they finally went back down to 1474/1474.50 instantly where the bid/ask had started at. Looks real weird on the ol' T&S in QT. Then the trades started going off at 1474.50 again. Glad I wasn't stuck in that trap...A stop limit market order would of cost you some money. Maybe this is what happened? P.S. The times I mentioned in the above post are PST not EST.