under the radar , page-8

Buddy,

Manipulation? You should be ashamed!

Even the ASX ASIC and Dept Fair Trading don't know what to call the activity or long-term effect that Algos will have on the market, nor whether or not they should remain legal. I beleive there is an assessment underway by ACCC or ASIC i cant recall, but it wa in the Aust Fin Review under 6mths ago.

I think what was happening in your case today was that an algorithmic trading bot that hellyeah so affectionately refers to on a first name basis was spraying a number of brokers and areas within the market. Tiny little "pings" based on parameters that are anticiapated to be suitable to give one broker an edge over the other by seeking out various targets like offscreen orders or average daily volumes per trade etc. This happens a bit before takeovers or trend reversals.

Take a look at this one particular Algo Strategy that you can buy as a service or software i think (not advertising them, sharing their purpose and accessability). They are pretty sneaky and thios one would suit the type of trading activity you saw today -

FlexTrade Systems Dark Router:

Provides customizable smart routing to any number of dark pool destinations selected by the trader. The algorithm is designed to hit all the destinations that are available at a client site, including any dark pool to which a client wishes to route, as well as any of their broker-dealer's dark routers. We are certified with more than 100 separate broker-dealers/ECNs/ATSs and dark liquidity pools. Limit, max percent of volume, time frame, aggressiveness, as well as how much of the overall order to display in each liquidity pool are just a few of the programmable parameters we allow. Additionally, each parameter can be set on an order-by-order basis or for an entire portfolio. FlexTrade's Dark Router algorithm can both spray and ping pools of liquidity. Dark Router can route mainstream if it does not find liquidity in the dark. Our system allows buy-side users to interact directly with each liquidity pool and does not use a broker for access. This allows full access to all crossing networks and dark books. Among other things, destinations can be preferenced by: 1) the destination that has executed the most trades; 2) any destination that requires a block size minimum; 3) commission rates; 4) past execution history; and 5) lowest post-trade transaction cost.


LINK for copyright reasons):
http://advancedtrading.thewallstreetwiki.com/directories/directory-dark-algorithms.php