The Bloomberg article was deleted, here’s the same off Reddit “ Street Enters Darker Age With Most Stock Trading Now Hidden Stay on topic Here’s a surprising new fact about the world’s largest and most-liquid public equity market: Most of the activity on it isn’t public anymore. For the first time on record, the majority of all trading in US stocks is now consistently occurring outside the country’s exchanges, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. This off-exchange activity — which happens internally at major firms or in alternative platforms known as dark pools — is on course to account for a record 51.8% of traded volume in January. Barring an unexpected dip, it will be the fifth monthly record in a row, and the third month running that hidden trades make up more than half of all volume. In other words, the shift “appears to be developing into a longer-term trend and quite possibly a permanent one at that,” Anna Ziotis Kurzrok, head of market structure at Jefferies, wrote in a note to clients this month. Off-exchange trading has been a growing feature on Wall Street for years, but until now public venues including the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have retained overall dominance of market activity. That’s important because exchanges display the quotes that most participants use to price stocks. The shift toward off-exchange trading is the culmination of a years-long trend, which if it continues could eventually have implications for how the market functions, according to Larry Tabb, head of market structure at Bloomberg Intelligence. “Theoretically the more trading that goes off-exchange, the fewer orders there are on-exchange competing to determine the best price,” he said. “This means the pricing on and off-exchange could get worse.” The Securities and Exchange Commission has in recent years taken steps to try to push more activity back on-exchange by revamping market structure. Of four proposals made by the SEC, only two rules — that tweak the way stocks get priced and trades are executed on and off-exchange — were ultimately passed. For now the threat to market efficiency remains a distant concern, with 48.2% of trades in January still happening on-exchange. Instead, the change is perhaps more useful as an indicator of the evolving market landscape. Kurzrok at Jefferies notes that the surge in off-exchange activity corresponds with increased volumes in stocks worth less than $1, which are typically traded by retail investors. That makes sense, since that business is often handled internally by market-making giants like Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial. When those sub-dollar stocks are stripped out of the data, off-exchange trading remains below 40% of total volume, according to calculations by Jefferies. So the apparent shift away from exchanges “doesn’t necessarily mean trading in one stock or all stocks is going to be worse off on any particular day,” Kurzrok said. Meanwhile, the number of off-exchange venues that offer an alternative, anonymous way to process trades has been growing. These alternative-trading systems, or ATS, use different mechanisms to match buyers and sellers without the desired price being displayed on a public exchange, or automated auctions where parties express the value they are willing to buy or sell stocks for. Using those venues helps institutional investors limit information leaking to the market and adversely affecting prices. About 1.7 billion shares a day changed hands on an ATS in November, the most since March of 2020 and 36% more than a year prior, according to analysis from Bloomberg Intelligence. “This new style of trading is different,” said Joe Saluzzi of Themis Trading. “The bigger institutions seem to have a better experience where they can command more value.” Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...darker-age-with-most-stock-trading-now-hidden
Damn that's brutal man even asked few years ago JPM had a study out where 90% of all volume is bots, so if it's just bots trading and they don't need to worry about the law since they are over sees i guarantee they are hitting themselves on moves like ALUR just to bump the volume numbers..... I remember in the morning at like 6 a.m. eastern time watching this size walk it up and down all morning..... they would throw up like a 5k share order on every single bid or offer and then when they lifted the bids or offers suddenly there is no liquidity for the next 20 cents, just orders for 100 or 200 shares I'm trying to play it back so I can see where people were actually getting filled on it, but if it's all over seas there is probably no laws saying they can't just hit themselves. Like they probably have bots now that are solely designed to create volume on a stock. Doesn't matter if you eat the commissions on both sides if you can take the 1 cent loss to generate a 10 dollar move
If anyone wants to run a Python script to take screenshots, here is one. Most examples I saw were making a full screenshot, this example takes a region instead, so you can modify the portion of the screen that you would like to take. Modify the input parameters for the screenshot function if you want a different region. doc is included. requirements file attached. Code: pip install -r requirements.txt Code: import pyautogui import time import os def screenshot(directory, interval, x, y, width, height): """ Takes a screenshot of a size at intervals n :param directory: directory to save screenshots :param interval: frequency in seconds :param x: starting point of the screenshot, 0 is at the left up corner :param y: starting point of the screenshot, 0 is at the left up corner :param width: width of the screenshot :param height: height of the screenshot """ if not os.path.exists(directory): os.makedirs(directory) try: count = 1 while True: timestamp = time.strftime("%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S") filename = os.path.join(directory, f"{count} -- {timestamp}.png") image = pyautogui.screenshot(region=(x, y, width, height)) image.save(filename) print(f"image saved: {filename} at {timestamp}") count += 1 time.sleep(interval) except KeyboardInterrupt: print("program exited") if __name__ == "__main__": endingDirectory = "captures" seconds = 10 screenshot(endingDirectory, seconds, 0, 0, 300, 400)