Roman Seleznev, the Russian hacker arrested while attempting to leave the Maldives back in 2014 has been convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison. He was convicted by the Seattle Federal District Court for hacking the Retail Point of Sales Systems across the United States and installing malicious software into the system and stealing millions of credit card numbers. The US Justice Department has previously alleged that he had stolen the credit card information of 500 US businesses and 3700 financial institutions. They all forgot to put their tin foil hat probably.
It would be a waste of time for a broker to try this with everyone but suppose they had a client that was doing really well then could they see that clients screen...notations..indicators he uses..etc and from that simply deduce how he is trading?
Why not just catch a ride? Why bother trying to figure it out? I guess you are thinking of long term, but for a broker just picking 5-10 very profitable traders and copying them is sufficient, no need for reverse engineering....
That leads to another question. Suppose the broker can " see" all you are doing..i.e. Markups...indicators..notation...etc and see where you are placing you orders..entries..PT ...SL...in your system THEN can they manipulate your data feed? Say there are two clients with the same broker and same platform and the same data feed. Are these two clients gonna always get the same grafical representation on their charts of the prices or can a broker "filter" the data feed of one client to momentarily say something else?
My screen has no any indicators. Just plain chart and order entry. So it will be very difficult , if not impossible, for anyone to figure out my approach, even he saw my screen. On the other hand, For most daytraders, if I see their entries and exits, I know what are their signals. For example, when I saw OP's first trade, I had a guess what is his entry signal, which were verified by his later trades.
No waste of time. Computers would do the work by simply archiving the data. Any trader that is performing well can be further 'looked at.' Even their past trades from when they weren't do so well could be looked at because they would be archived. Simple systems can be reversed engineered. Reverse engineering complex systems would be like cracking AES encryption or simply cracking the market itself...it depends upon the system, of course. I'm merely stating what's theoretically possible...for shi+s and giggles.
Should i put on a 2" thick lead hat? What about the data feed manipulation? Possible? Does it happen?