check some old posts,like this comment https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...in-illicit-profits.291548/page-3#post-4123813 "I miss the old days when if you were trading wheat there were only two big players, Cargill and the Soviet Union. And just like in forex today when a big bank needs to buy they sell everything, when the Soviet Union needed to buy (and everybody knew they needed to because they were starving) they would dump wheat on the market until they had shaken even you and everybody else out....and then buy like you knew they always would. And nobody ever knew for sure what Cargill's role was in all this."
Traditionally the job of a market maker was to provide liquidity as they traded their own book. Another job was to fill buy orders for a large client at or below the day's VWAP. (If they want to keep that clients business) They would do it by auctioning the market down hunting for weak hands, breakdown traders, hedgers, stops, i.e anybody willing to sell. In a rising market the chart visual pullbacks/shakeouts below the VWAP are auction market selling into the larger clients buy orders. If you are a large fund and you are rotating out of one stock and into another you don't want your orders to affect the price of the stock. This is the market makers job and he does it well if he wants to keep the fund as a client and keep securing order flow. There are MM algos that do this now.
Ever hear of the dark pools? They claim big investors hide their trades in the black pools and other investors and traders cannot see their trades till days later. Do not know if this is true and have no idea how to access it if at all!
Yes, was thinking of that after I'd posted, dark pools where insto's use them to hide their hand and not using them when they wish to reveal their hand. Another retail trader's 'been shafted' tool, probably only the tip of the iceberg.
I don't know how other successful traders doing it, but my honest answer, IMO, to you is that indicators like volume, smart/dumb money and etc... won't help you to catch those big INTRADAY movements. Other indicators might work to suggest momentum when signal lines cross above or below center line, but those indicators are NOT reliable because they are often provide you fake signals. So, you have to go deeper than that. Well, I'm not going to disclose my methods on here because nobody is going to tell you anyway due to tons of energy and money involved in order to figure it out. All I can say is that catching those big intraday movements requires strategies which are beyond using indicators and STOP WASTING TIME on searching stuff like dark pool, smart/dumb money.... You can do that out of curiosity, but you will end up wasting your time with those stuff. Good luck...
Thx for reply. Yup, the retail trader largely doesn't have the correct tools by & large and any attempts are futile to fight. Possibly if I subscribed to intraday tick data or such, I may be able to figure it out but won't bother as there is no end to going down rabbit holes. I'm running a journal called supalgo and this past week have been coding like no tomorrow on ideas and coming up with results which will make my stock picks more accurate. But indicators as such am not a fan in their raw sense, but certain indicators can be used to give mathmatical calculations which do assist. Anyhow legal types of spoofing to drive down price will always be with us and prolly difficult to anticpate, however trading is largely a game of bluff for insto's and I work my strategies aware of it. Just frustrating as it entails drawdowns on a regular basis which when all combined together (am holding 20 stock positions atm) when mkt feeling weak a tad disconcerting. Adapt or die, my motto. No way to avoid pain for the trader, hehe.