Ask HN: HN Any way for individual to gain access to Dark Pool trading data | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: HN Any way for individual to gain access to Dark Pool trading data

10 pointsmarkus_zhang3 comments

Hi trading experts, back in 2012 I did a few months of scraping and momentum trading in a legitimate day-trading shop, as a summer job. I still remember the ECNs e.g. ARCA (I think it was $1.75 per hand back then, way more expensive then the usual $0.50 ones but they offered some rebates).

But what fascinated me most was the Dark Pools. They were the most expensive ones, with the cheapest came as $2 per hand, if I remember correctly. But they are very valuable tools if you want to cover position quickly when the market suddenly goes against you.

My question is: Fast forward to today. My understanding is that Dark Pools registered with SEC only reports transactions, not buyers/sellers, as described in the following article:

https://therealdeal.com/2020/05/18/mystery-investor-dumps-big-stake-in-real-estate-fund/

But so far I couldn't find any information on those Dark Pools. I know they are lucrative and individuals only can participate in if they trade in bulk (i.e. setting up a day trading firm), but what about historical data? Any place to see them?

Thanks in advance.

Some more fun facts:

Back then my best stock was CIM (still alive as of today) as it moved very slowly during the day. I was only good at scalping i.e. you add liquidity on both sides of the trade and hopefully they got filled at the same time, a bit like market making but in reality not the same.

CIM was really suitable for scalping at that time and I was really good at it, so they raised my limit to 10 or 20 hands per trade (you start from 1 hand and gradually move up), but then they told me that CIM was pretty much capped around 10/20K per trade so I need to learn other techniques. I tried some momentum trading but lost all the $$ I won so I quit after a few months.

I still remember they told us that I need to find something that has at least 1 million per day and less than $10 while moving slowly during the day, so that the liquidity is good and we don't lose much if a trend hit. I also noticed that whenever my order got filled quickly I was on the wrong side of the trade, so I learned a bit about tape reading and improved my revenue. The other stock I traded was NLY but I lost badly on that one.

Interested as well if anyone has an answer to provide

Yeah this is really interesting. Back then the dark pools are indeed dark as we didn't see depth but the liquidity was really good and the big players typically used them for large volume trading. The mentor also asked us to set up different colors for different types of ECNs and different volumes so we could read the tape easily.

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