how do you know the size is still legit

how are you prepared for the up coming changes? Do you look for size or do you look for small but deadly 3k shares keep stepping down, and then blew up to a full size then gets printed?

 

What I've been doing the past 12 months or so is to pay a lot more attention to charts rather than size. Learning to find strong or weak charts in stocks that I am comfortable trading. Also watching sectors a lot more than I used to. Size is becoming more and more meaningless. Institutions have caught on to the size trading by daytraders and really play games now. And also they seem to be sending a lot more order flow away from the specialist to ECN's. This way they able to control how their order is executed and seen by the specialist and daytraders instead of givng some specialist control who may decide to take a profit himself on a large order.

 

yep. do you still do tape reading? many say it isn't as crucial now as before.

 

not as much..but it still can be very helpful depending on the stocks your trading... its partially becuz I also trade many more higher volume stocks than I used to where a lot of the trading volume is on ECN's. Tape reading is probably still much more effective on the lower volume stocks. ECN's seem to control stock prices much more on the thicker stocks than they used to becuz of the increased order flow coming from institutions.

 

What are market shorts?

 

the past year i found how the specialist spreading to have the most change. specialists used to spread up / down frequently to sweep up open book limit orders. but the past year with ecn gaining market share specialist spreading has been very irregular. this has affected my trading the most imo.

 

Short sellers that must be filled on the uptick.

 

yes, and currently I have noticed that more than ever. Sometimes he would not even lock the book and just leave the quote on a price level after where the size is and just unloads the whole size. The specialist can unload even if he doesn't lock the book because it's within the spread. Sometimes you can predict it as the size is no longer aggressive and the ECNs are starting to turn...

 

Pull up time and sales next to level II. There are footprints if the size is real.

 

Open book is now in realtime. It's been available since May1. They had to upgrade this feature to get ready for the Hybrid Market. http://www.nysedata.com/openbook/