Hi fellows, I would really appreciate if you share your experience about Dark Pools. I´m tired of liying on a price and watching thousands of fills at my price in dark pools so I would like to receice some information about the most common dark pools you use and the oppinion if you find them useful. What are the biggest dark pools right now? Is there any agregator ECN that seeks for orders in many dark pools and you get a faster fill? I even would mind to pay a higher price if my order gets filled before, for example if I send a buy order at 12,35 I would agree to be filled 12,351 or 12,352 or 12,353 is there any way I can offer my orders to enter in the subpenny venue? Many thanks!
You Don't use dark pools for faster fills. You use them to find liquidity or avoid ECN fees. If you want faster fills, use DMA.
Piyayo, you won't like the answer, but bypassing the queue via alternative routes like NYSEFloor or darkpools is definitely a strategy that does not work anymore. It used to and that's what all the scalpers in C did a couple of years ago, but posting like 10k shares via darkpools, wait to get hit before the level flips and bail for a scratch is a dead end today. If you want fills in thick symbols, consider posting on ECN's with inverse rebate structures like BYX, EDGA or NQBX and pay the maker fee. You will get filled before all other ECNs, but have to pay for posting. If you are not in a hurry, consider posting midpoint liquidity via ARCAMPL (small rebate but good fills. Besides that, I would suggest that you put your focus on taking liquidity where ever you can and select the routes that either are cheap or give you price improvement. The risk of posting a passive order is way to big. You get filled when you are wrong and you wont, when you are right.
You could try IEX; they are gaining a lot of market share and have various features that they claim make their market more fair and less susceptible to HFT abuses. I like their features at present, especially now that they've eliminated "broker preferencing" in order to further their exchange application: https://www.iextrading.com
To the OP, yeah you want a route that intelligently hits many dark pools (including IEX). IB smart route hits the big dark pools. I am with T3 and use their SmartMid route, it intelligently scans many dark pools and then posts in the one with the most liquidity. Seems all the decent direct access broker have dark routes like this. And they are fast, about as fast as trading on normal exchanges, nothing to worry about.