Is machine going to take over the whole trading world? What's the trend and limitation of algorithmic trading? Of the whole trading activity now, how much does machines account for?
Remember that mice danced at the feet of the dinosaurs. The small rodent trader will always be with us, scratching tasty morsels from dinosaur shit.
I can only speak to NQ, but if algos were dominating NQ trading I would expect to see size frequently traded. Instread what I see is about 95% of the trades being small lots, onesy-twosy-threesies. It is straightforward to capture the number of trades and the corresponding volume to verify this, or by eyeballing the tape. So if the peanut gallery is providing the liquidity, are they going to take away the peanuts?
Your thinking is one dimesional. Some algos send 1 contract orders at a time, then have a time delay till they send another. The purpose is of course to mask their size....
Don't see much need for that in NQ. Trying to mask an order of thousands of contracts? Market is somewhere else before you can do it one at a time. And NQ often says "ho-hum" to a 100 contract trade, which is typicasl of "large" size, so why bother? Try telling the difference between a position trade and a hedge.
Au contraire: Small lots can be traded at high precision (pricewise) only by algos not by humans (too slow). Big lots is indicative of true dinosaurs trading like pension funds (or sometimes an algo catching a chance).
There is no doubt that you know more about the markets than I do. To me it is a video game that comes without a manual. All I know is what parts of the missing manual I have deduced from observation. And large prints in NQ are anything but Jurassic. They tend to occur at what I consider to be technically savvy inflections or breakouts. Or sometimes they scream "I know something YOU don't!" So from my unidimensional viewpoint, an algo trading one is a one-lot piker just like me.