if the market marker and every market particiapant knows about it's public information. and is not frontrunning. it's only illegal if you are the only one who knows about it. rarely is information know a few people..most likely if an individual traders knows about it...hundreds know about it in the grapevine. avoid trading with 'insider information' i'm sure the information is already 'public information'. just not published in the media. client orders are only known between client and broker market maker. go figure. and with hidden orders...it gets even more stupid. in the marketplace. retail clients can see anything only qaunts or HFT can trade that fast and gather that much information.. HFT didn't exist int he 80's or even 90's because computers weren't that intelligent or fast.
there's a flittery rumour among the trading community that big money uses formulas to enter long/short on instruments... if such a formula existed/discovered would it be illegal to exploit? i assume the use of dark pools would make this invisibe to retail traders but not MMs i guess
At this very moment, Lloyd Blankfein, is sitting in a brown, Italian leather chair looking over the lights of the city from high atop 15 Central Park West. He regrets having not been able to join Sting and his wife Trudie for late night cocktails, but he has a far more important matter on his mind. He has finished his dinner of poached sweetbreads on toast and is enjoying a small glass of Drambuie as he peruses Echo's account, a printout of which was delivered only moments ago by bicycle courier. His liquor laden breadth is one of resolve. He is not yet sure of his plan, but he is confident that whatever move Echo makes next he will be ready to counter thrust with deadly force, driving Echo's positions into oblivion, without mercy, without remorse. He intends to take no prisoners.
FYI, any market has "tells". Extracting the market's offer is not a brief momentary experience. Making money is done in "chunks" or what is called profit segments. There is a relationship between chunk size and trades per day. In ES a chunk is measured in terms of margin. You could think about doubling your money trading the ES. By looking at the size of a profit segment on any time based chart, you can calculate the numbeer of trades and thus the amount of time required to meet any goal. On a 5 ,im ES chart you can see that the chunks could be 4 points. 8 chucks would be required to double your capital. How long is a chunk on the 5 minute chart? You can see that in the am and pm it is about three bars or under 15 minutes. 8 times 15 is less than 6 1/2 times 60, the time of a day's trading. I use about 10 to 12 leading indicators of ES price. I do not want to fill up my screens too much. If you have a friend who has a baby see if he will let you give the baby ome candy. Then later see if you can take the candy away from the baby. It may be difficult at the beginning because you have no experience..... but soon you will figure out how to take candy away from babies.
ok boys. i was a clerk at the c.b.o.t. in the late 1980's. i worked for the largest retail brokerage firm at that time . at the end of the day trading session i would receive a letter from the clearing room and deliver it to the ceo . most of the time the letter was not sealed so i looked inside and saw a print out of all the days orders in sugar, soybeans, gold, etc... of how many customers were open yet long or short. i kept track of the gold market. if there was 7000 open long contracts and 1800 open short contracts you would think the market was in strong hands but no way the next day gold would be down. it really is the rule that 90% of speculators lose money. THE INSIDE DOES KNOW WHICH SIDE OF THE MARKET THE PUBLIC IS ON. WHERE THERE IS MONEY THERE'S GREED. bp