I duno, have no proof. However, you will thru long painful experience until you get enough trades to statistically confirm suspicions. Say if your edge is 57% at 1:1 (Cornix stat I believe) then you probably need couple 100 trades to confirm. Lots of wasted life. I prefer to address problem before/if appears. So my tolerance for drawdowns is real small. hft high frequency traders - they figure out what you do and where is stop and deal wih you in couple of seconds. I was manipulated enough to be careful
I am kind of suspicious this guy is really a good trader. what I only can say he is very discplined. if that guy works like a machine or robot, then wall street can be replaced with algorithm trading, let computer program do it. since I am a discretional trader. I do not trade purely technically. though I like cripsy cut science. to my common sense, trading really needs rules and disciplines, from this point of view, I think he is really a good trader. market is not crispy cut science, full of maybe this maybe that, too many variables. that easily creates confusion/hestitation to enter or get out. from this fact, I think clearly define what you do is verycritical. I have a bad experience last week, I bought last lastweek friday NBG's 4.5 call, this monday it jumps, my calls rockets 5folds, I am wondering thisjunk will shoot more, obviously I already noticed NBG pullbackwith heavy volume thursday, and a thrust failed bar in 5.59 (5.5 breakout failed), all means SELL, but I still hold, then on thursday I cannot tolerate any more, get rid of it. according to my rules, I should observe the market after I enter, any sign of exit, I should take. but I broken it, ignore those market signs, waste me time. if I get out on tuesday, I can put more focus on SPY,grab the whole SPY reserval. Disciplined army always beat lousy loose lazy army. but too mechanical is I do not agree. for example, NBG last week, the SELL signs are tuesday's heavy volume with noprogress, in the opening it jumps to new high, some guys whohave stop there, and there is no much stop loss there, that means, breakout of 5.5 failed, it is a pump and dump, SELL is obvious. a disciplined and wise trader will watch those signs, then sell. a mechincal disciplied trader may put a stop buy above monday high, end up with loss, or a program trader.
I have had the experience of being on the wrong side of the "evaporation" -- having a short executed at it's bottom for it to instantly bounce back up and take me out. I think you may be guessing wrong and expressing concepts s/he is not aware of.
you correct, I am not too familiar with these concepts as I trade longer term. I was referring to trader whos trades are copied by larger trader. Your 3 contracts trade immediately attracts 100 contracts trade and now you have 10 pips stop for 103 contracts. Hopefully that larger trader does not frontrun your order It is very hard to detect someone copying your trades. if you think this is scifi, see forex forums where trade copiers are widespread.
Lately in CL I enter with SLs (2 ticks room) and surprisingly get pretty good fills. While stop-losses are usually not where it's likely to attract too many people and thus never led to serious slippage as well. Trade less than 10 contracts though, much less. Don't know if HFT can "see" stop orders sitting somewhere or just the obvious levels where they likely are placed?
my wild guess - if orders are on exchange servers, they are sold further if interested buyer exists. so it is easy to create robot that copies orders where traders last 40 trades have say 50% and last 20 70%+ win rate or something like that and stops copying when win rate drops under 60%. it is not unsolvable as one should check sales history, just in case. If someone copies after you entered and exits after you exit, not much damage. If you can hide your stops, you laughing.
Probably. Not sure though if that is the case and if stop orders are actually sold. Also if there's say 10 cars order alone in some place, it will take more than that to move the price there even one tick most of the time during RTH. Not worth it IMO. So there's a danger mostly in obvious areas of likely mass stop orders placement. Remember, HFT doesn't play for US to lose, HFT plays for THEM to make money. Thus investment in "running the stops" must pay off in the form of relatively significant move, doesn't matter lasting 1 second or less, but significant enough (several ticks at least is my guess).
Not planning to share what I do there for now. Not because it's something secret, just because I'm in the phase of my own personal research currently and got pretty busy with "real" family business last couple of months.