To all of those having these problems. May I ask how you route your orders? And who do you trade through?
u cant beat HFT because u are a small trader. Small! Small! s...m-all <iframe width="480" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lag73IP2CPY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
sure..IB. from my experience routing directly to market center,where in example above bid was sitting wouldn't change anything. makes no difference if it's either "smart" or directed order.
if you post what platform, what route, and what route strategy you used to place the order you might get better answers. without that, hard to say what's going on.
My thoughts exactly. It doesn't matter how fast the robot is. It can't remove it's bid after your crossed ask hits the ecn. That would be some serious foul play.
It's a LATENCY GAME fellas! The Exchanges have offered the HFT firms the "right" to see order-flow given how much quicker their data-feeds are due to CO-LOCATION of their trading servers right on the floor of the Nasdaq data-centers in NJ. The ability to CO-LOCATE is offered to ANYONE by the Exchange. This is a big revenue stream for the Exchange. Period. End of Story. It's ALL about the ability to FRONT-RUN because you can CO-LOCATE on the floor of the EXCHANGE DATA-CENTER. For the retail trader, it's as if you are sitting up in the stands watching a Horse Race. Given the data-feed latency that you experience with your trading platform, you are watching the horses round the final turn while the HFT crowd who have co-located their servers on the Exchange floor have already seen the winner just come thru the finish line.
getting a glimpse of price even a few millisecs before everyone else is like getting tomorrows newspaper? right wrong?
IMO Colocation and speed are a fine game as soon as it is based on trades, quotes or active book liquidity that already occured( like in the futures markets ). The problem here is not that retail are late to the game of the MMs , it is that the MMs see the incoming marketable orders before they are matched.
Are you sure of that? Is this your speculation or the speculation of places like zeroHedge? Is there an actual account of this? As far as I'm aware. The only time someone sees orders before they are matched is when you are trading through a firm that internalizes (i.e. IB and just about every other retail outfit) and you use their smart orders.
Hello earlyexit, I am not a stock trader, I don't know much so of course it can be an internalizer( in this case, it's just IB that screwed me ), I am not aware enough of how the stock markets work. I am just stating that on some low volume stocks( with 10 ticks + B/A spread ) , when you click on some bid or ask, you have a good chance it will disappear just because of your order.