Hi Rocky, What I find more interesting is how they get away with...

Hi Rocky,

What I find more interesting is how they get away with these trades without appearing in the BUY/SELL side.
I looked up an interesting, but not well known technique used by brokers. It makes the market their playground at our expense.
It seems like a well unlevelled playing field to me.

Dark Ice Algo
Objective

The Dark Ice order type develops the concept of privacy adopted by orders such as Iceberg or Reserve, using a proprietary algorithm to further hide the volume displayed to the market by the order. Clients can determine the timeframe an order remains live and have the option to allow trading past end time in the event it is unfilled by the stated end time. In order to minimize market impact in the event of large orders, users can specify a display size to be shown to the market different from the actual order size. Additionally, the Dark Ice algo randomizes the display size +/- 50% based upon the probability of the price moving favorably. Further, using calculated probabilities, the algo decides whether to place the order at the limit price or one tick lower than the current offer for buy orders and one tick higher than the current bid for sell orders.

Cheers,
IHS