No, just timber hill but the volumes are immaterial as they have NO knowledge of IB order flow. If anything, it's the other way around as Timber Hill is known for showing it's pricing in the options markets.
This idea that stops are visible to others comes up constantly, for most every market. Someone usually comes along to "confirm" it, too. How could any market justify allowing anyone to have knowledge of where stops are? In what way could this ever benefit the party placing the stop?
Also, people tend to "remember" the times when stopped out but forget them when profis are taken within couple of ticks of a swing hi/lo.
No, I didn't pick and choose the "unfortunate" stop-outs. It was a consistent phenomenon over several days and several trades. Happened too often to be just "random price noise". Anyway, it's obvious that some players are doing stop-gunning in YM, due to its relatively small liquidity. This is much less of a problem in ES (but ES has disadvantage of very large tick size 0.25pt vs daily range of 8-9pt). Anyway, thanks for the feedback, everyone.
Based on this thread, I traded YM this afternoon. I think the volatility is being confused for stop-running. YM seems to trade in excess of what ES does and what "theoretically" YM SHOULD. I used a 5 point stop with a target of 8 and was never stopped on 5 lot trades. Made about $640 in 2 hours. I'm sure it happens, didnt happen to me today.
I agree that YM is more "spiky". I tried to use YM as a ES proxy with higher tick-resolution, i.e. have my levels for ES but trade YM. It didn't work very well for me (due to those spikes). That would effectively be 4pt stop. Assuming price needs to trade THROUGH your limit order to get a fill, and just trade 1c for a split-second at your stop price to take you out. Interesting. You must be very skilled, have very fast feed (my Internet / eSignal can lag a couple of seconds sometimes) and very low commissions. Still 5 YM ticks would be a very small stop for the trading style I tried on YM. I would think that I would get stopped out all the time, if I used 5pt. I used inital stops twice as large (10-11ticks) in YM and my profit targets were 20 or more.
Only you can decide what your style is. But if I may, can I suggest you consider looking at the PC-router-modem you use? Some of them dont work well together and may cause your lagging. Also, you may want to consider running drtcp from dslreports.com to see if you need some changes on your pc settings. Its free and can improve your pc's performance. Also, consider using pingplotter to ping the price server that feeds you data to see how far away you are and then compare that data to data from other brokers to see if you can get closer. Both minor ideas but it may speed your executions up a bit.
Pingplotter provides a nice graphical representation of Trace Route data. You can get the information from a DOS prompt on your computer. Under the Start button, Run... , then type cmd. That will give you a DOS window. From there you can type either of these commands. I'll use www.yahoo.com as an example. Replace that with the address of your broker's server. tracert www.yahoo.com or ping www.yahoo.com Compare the times in milliseconds that the command returns. If you are on a broadband connection, I'd expect that time to be under 100 ms. 60-80 ms is good. But really, the comparison is more important. It'll tell you a good deal about the path to your trading server.