Very true syndrom, but I don't think that necessarily proves that they know "who you are" (e.g. someone who is trying to close out a trade) and were after you.
as this has happened to a few traders i know personaly (however not to me) i know the specialist does not know who you are.....but they know through which brokerage firm/clearing firm you trade and if you piss them off enough they will contact the firm your orders go though who will then in turn contact you. say for instance if you happen to trade a high percentage of the daily volume on a certain stock the specialist will be looking to see who you are and why one person traded 50% of the daily volume. so no they dont know who you are at that specific moment...but they can find you......
All they need to know is the clearing firm ID and from what I have been able to figure out, that is all they know. Since daytrader clearing firms are easily recognizable by their SDOT id, the specialists can easily filter out and target the daytrader orders. They do get to know you after a while, if the stock is not too well attacked by daytraders and your style has patterns. I know the FCL guy got to know me back in the day, since I used to run like 10-20% of his daily volume and was one of the few daytraders that would trade it on a regular basis. He started going after my orders, especially since I used the ECNs extensively on the stock and I think that pissed him off a lot. If you consider a stock like X or NUE or VLO, the specialist obviously knows that many many daytraders are involved. He can tell the hedge fund and institution orders since those are usually much larger or are being filled via algos. But there is no way he would be able to tell one from the other, he does not really have time for it anyway. So if X seems to give you sh*t fills all the time, it's not just you. BTW, the clerk fills limit orders while the specialist is the only one who can handle markets. They do have a computer there and a lot of the time, everything is handled electronically. A stock doing nothing during lunch needs minimal specialist involvement.
Every single order routed to the specialist has a unique tag number identifying the originating party.
They don't match up the orders manually, most use automated bots for that. Specialists manually match up large orders that hit the floor or when they want to screw some poor schmucks they know have a 1 penny tolerance on their trades.
The only time you get "banned" by a specialist is by bombarding him with 5-10 100 share market orders in a row, do a search on this clown and see why he was 'banned".
There seems to be some difference of opinion if one can be identified. Sometimes, you can trade a stock profitably for several days, then the specialist catches on to what you're doing. If you then act from a different account, will that help?