No it is not rigged to squash retail. They don’t care about us. We are 5% of the trading. We are tortilla chip money. Candy bar money. All of us together do not have enough money nor do we play with enough money to interest them. The markets are the institutions taking money from each other. If we retail traders can’t make money it is simply because we are not yet good enough to understand and read the chart and divine what the institutions are doing. And which institutions are winning ATM, the bullish or the bearish institutions.
Yes, but not in the way that you think. Continuous dual auction markets are designed to maximize trading volume. If one begins to consider how this is accomplished, then market dynamics get clearer. It is true that some participants have a structural advantage. It’s also true that what is promoted as conventional wisdom isn’t the best domain to put the pieces together.
It’s interesting that the COT reports have been delayed during these volatile times, maybe it’s nothing and just coincidence.
It is not rigged to go after retail traders. We are minnows in a great big pond of sharks. We are way too little for them. They don’t care about you or I. They are after each other. If there is any rigging done it is to take money from one institution to put it another institution accounts. But they cannot hide. The charts show what they are trying to do as they attempts to take money from each other. And then you got others that want delivery on products such as grains. They want to lock in prices beforehand. Their interest is not in speculating for $$$ but in securing products such as corn (think Kellogg). Over 200 big institutions trade and they are the ones making the markets. They are not for the most part interested in running retail SL’s. It may seem they are. A retail trader enters long on 3 contracts sets his SL and bam it is taken out in a few minutes then the market goes back up and he would have had a profit but he lost. Why? Were they running his SL? No. Institutions don’t care about you or me. That would be like an elephant searching for a peanut. It ain’t gonna satisfy him. Price went down because some institution wanted it to go there and the tiny retail trader got caught in the crossfire so to speak. Maybe it was bearish institution trying for a BO south. Or a bullish institution wanting to load up cheaper for a subsequent bull move. It ain’t like they saw a peanut here and another one there and raced to gobbled them up. It may feel like it is so to a retail trader but that is not what happened. The sooner a trader can dispense with the idea that they are “after him” the sooner he can become a profitable trader. It is a market. Markets go up and they go down probing for price levels and value areas. And institutions do the probing. We have to learn to detect what they are doing and jump on the winning side. At any moment in time you have both bearish and bullish institutions probing and pushing price around for any myriad of unknown (to the retail trader) reasons.
I remember long ago, I was trading on Sim and the basstids were gunning for my stops, dang annoying, you just can't get away from 'em.