It was probably a BUYER trying to drum up some volume to pick up. Based on the slow upward march since the open, it seems this market is just surrounded by buyers. Inventory is low on the sell side...that's why we keep doing this upside slog.
I heard that Kim Jong Un trades 10,000 cars at a time and that he once had 1,000 consecutive winning trades in a row trading the E-mini. I also hear from a source, that he is up over 2,000% YTD in 2013 and that he has the #1 ranked account on Covestor.
very true... could be the old bait and switch trick. or an attempt to scare traders away from buying. It is very possibly real... I mean look at the run up in the s&P in the past year...a big fund taking some size off the table is not a surprise. Craziest thing i ever saw for obvious large size market reversal...was back in 2009 in the financial crisis...the final month before the low...I saw huge orders on the EURO Stock futures probably a few times a week 4K plus were getting hit...never saw that ever before...then low and behold the market bottoms and we never looked back. I guess sometimes in can be a good indicator but hey people gotta sell too
Assuming I understand the date and time correctly, my guess is a resting order by a well informed and very large participant placed at settlement from the prior session with the expectation that settlement would be revisited.
Settlement for 10th was at 29.5. The huge size was placed at 29. Probably you are correct. Thanks for the explanation. http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equ...mini-sandp500_quotes_settlements_futures.html
Considering there is about 4000-5000 contracts traded every minute, that must mean there is a sizeable amount of size which is hidden from the public view (aka icebergs) 11k... ESP away from the inside market, is pointless. It could just mean the trader chose not to use an iceberg, whether intentional or not. Nobody said order fillers are the smartest guys in the room.
I agree that the informative value is minimal and generally I have not found anything informative in the DOM for ES and this is logical given the various ways the instrument is used. Occasionally I will see some size in the TF DOM that is informative in the moment. In my view the size was visible because the participant wanted it to be visible to somebody but I can think of scenarios both ways for that so its a wash IMO.