That is what I am talking about Echo, I agree with you << As soon as you close the position, magically prices will move through this price point and you end up feeling like a fool for having been played one more time.>> But also I am talking about not just intraday. Lets if you buy a stock which is just supposed to go up by all kinds of reasons ( fundamental, technical etc. ) and then it gets killed ⦠And you would ask who in the world would sell it ? And why ? By all kinds of reasons you would think it is time to buy and not to sell, but still someone is selling and selling pushing and manipulating the stock down. As long as someone has to get out of his position because of leverage reasons then the stock moves up quickly !
The MM's dont know or care what's in your position. In straight equities your broker sends orders to many different mm's all as part of payment for order flow deals. Your order is not tagged with an account as it hits the MM's book. Why would he even care whose account it is? In all but the most thinly traded stocks he's not able to move the market for 1 retail order. In the options markets the payment for orderflow deals are even more serious because not only do mm firms want orderflow and are willing to pay for it they'd like it to go to a particular exchange they have deals with too. retail options order flow is subject to NBBO. As far as someone like Goldman goes, they dont have a bunch of guys sitting around with charts trading stock and futures looking for entry and exit points. They are liquidity providers and strategic trading desks who have a HUGE institutional sales force feeding them orders, so NO they dont trade like retail people. They also have the ability to get in any out because they have the sales force to move what they want and dont want.
they don't need to know your positions because they create the positions in the first place. "At one p.m., the geniuses down at the National Association of Securities Dealers, the NASD, released Steve Madden Shoes for trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the four letter trading symbol SHOO: pronounced shoe. How cute and appropriate that was! And as part of their long-standing practice of having their heads up their asses, they reserved the distinguished honor of setting the price for the opening tick for me, the Wolf of Wall Street. It was just another in a long line of ill-conceived trading policies that were so absurd that they all but assured that every new issue coming out on the NASDAQ would be manipulated in one way or another, regardless of whether or not Stratton Oakmont was involved in it."" THE WOLF OF WALL STREET - Jordan Belfort http://www.cardozaplayer.com/article_details.php?cid=121&contentType=1&typeSub=0
Market makers/specialists/market movers are not simply making markets anymore as they used to do in the old days. They have their computers programmed to execute your order and immediately move the market in the other direction, trying to stop you out. I don't know how, but it seems that they are able to do this on an individual trader basis. This is happening on stocks that trade over 2M shares/day and on orders of just 500 shares. As an example, I was trading CLF on Thursday and entered an order to buy 500 shares at the offer. My order executed and then the market immediately tanked by 70 cents. All bids immediately disappeared and the offers were taken down, with no trades happening. How they can do this is beyond me, but it is happening!!! These guys are able to move the price any way they want on any stock except the thickest of them all (e.g. MSFT). Concerning the price getting stuck at a certain level and not going through to give you a profit, I have repeatedly had this happen to me on positions that were even entered as multiple entries giving me an average price that no one except someone that was able to track my individual orders could possibly know what my position was. The computer algorithms are pretty sophisticated these days. The theory of how the market is supposed to operate is a nice fiction story that is pushed to us by wall street, however the reality is very different. This completes my paranoid rant for the morning. Echo
If the "big guys" knew about my positions... They'd laugh themselves into near unconsciousness! Good trading to all.
This is utter bs and paranoia. At any given time there are multitudes of participants executing different strategies in the stock you trade. The hubris you guys have in thinking they care about your 500 share order is bullshit. There are swing traders entering orders who have holding times of up to 5 days. There are high frequency algorithm traders who enter 1000s of orders a day in the stock you are looking at. There are normal prop discretionary traders who exit and enter with their key strokes. There are vwap institutional orders. There are program traders. There are cash/futures arbs. There are fundamental buyers and sellers of stocks. There are mom and pop 100 share pikers entering orders. There are dark pools where alot of volume trades off exchange that influence price direction. The mm/specialist doesn't know and doesn't care about your order and is probably getting his clock cleaned for the trading day. Also you are telling me that a stock that trades 2 mil shares a day will trade down 70 cents after you execute your 500 share order and no other participants come in to take advantage of these "low" prices. Your 500 share order equals less than .0004 percent of the daily volume. You think a mm really cares about your volume.
I hear ya. Uh uh, no way I want people laughing at me, I ain't taking the blame. I have a handy list of excuses I keep right near the phone. I put on a trade, everyone is laughing behind the scenes, I expect a phone call at any moment "Do you know what you just did?" (Laughter in the background) I can hear it. I'd tell 'em "it was Paw", yup, got up out of the rocker and made that trade. "I don't care if you say it was in "my" account, "It wasn;'t me who did that" "Fes up Nutmeg, you know dang well it was you" "Okay, busted" But.. but.. (light goes off in my head) It wasn't me.. no no no.. Timmay made me do it. Ya see he has this book.." Click. Silence. WTF??? They hung up on me, mnnnhhh guess they know what the problem is... won't be calling me back...
You're trying to rationalise, you think some one is taking your money. noone is. you just can't manage the market's volatility. there is no such thing such as "Big Guys". It's just a complex that you have. stop trading.
many stocks have more than one market maker, and they will compete with each other. In fact, market makers are nothing more than glorified scalpers. Yes, market makers will run or gun stock prices to catch a big order or stop that they see on the book, that is why you see so many gaps fade and then take off in the other direction, they want to fill those orders on the books from the previous day that did not get filled. If you think the market makers will collectively move a stock just to pressure 500 shares you are crazy. The only people who think this way are traders who load up their whole position at once. Try averaging in. When I average in or pyramyd I actually hope the market moves against me because my first entry is always small . Be familiar with a stocks average intraday range and any recent news. Become familiar with how a stock trades by trading micro positions until you get it right. Learn to think in percentages about EVERYTHING ! and not dollars. People are impressed with GOOG going from $400 to $700... I am not... It's the same as a $4 stock going to $7 dollars. It took GOOG a year to do that and If you allocate the same percentage of your portfolio for both a $7 or $70 or $700 stock and it moves up 5% in a day you will make the same amount of profit in any of them, and far more $4 dollar stocks will move to $7 than $400 to $700 Once you master thinking in percentages you will never look at the market the same way again. Market Makers... LOL, they are the reason I make money
lol And in the spirit of "Somebody broke into my IB account and put some really shitty trades in there!"... OMFG! ABK??? MBI??? I'm callin' da cops! Good luck to all.