2 interesting articles this week from WSJ and Reuters on the untamed and unaccountable dark pools in the market.What are dark pools?The WSJ defines them as "the secretive electronic trading networks that match buyers and sellers anonymously." These trades are done outside of the traditional stock markets like the NYSE and NASDAQ.The WSJ journal points to the dark pools at failing on their promise of making it easy to move large shares without affecting price. In fact with more dark pool firms competing for volume and their share of the business, the consulting firm TowerGroup reports that the average trade was just 260 shares at the beginning of 2008. A decade ago it averaged over 1,400 shares. Ugly shrinkage.The Reuters article observes that as a result of the competition for liquidity and volume, many dark ...

I'm sliding under the table to you some excerpts from a recent interview that our Director of Trader Education, Jamie Hodge, gave to our good friend Dave Mabe of StockTickr. You'll understand after reading the entire interview how to win against today's market that's eliminated many of the information advantages traders used to have and how to trade where the greatest odds of winning exist - below is a slice of the interview.Reprinted with permission:

Q: What single lesson did you learn along the way that has helped you the most in your trading?Never become complacent – especially when you’ve been "gimmick trading" all of your career. I refer to any trading practice that can become extinct from a rule change or system replacement as gimmick. The prime example was SOES (Small Order Execution System). Once the SOES phenomenon started taking root, the big boys were

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UPDATE: Here is Dave himslef talking about his presentation: http://blog.stocktickr.com/2008/02/08/presentation-on-automation-at-traders-expo/If you are attending the upcoming NY Traders Expo beginning Sunday and lasting until Tuesday next week, you'll want to see one of our subscribers, Dave Mabe of StockTickr, use Trade-Ideas to fatten his portfolio. Dave is one of the nicest guys you'll meet in a place like this or anywhere else. What you see is what you get with this guy. Here's what you'll see:

This session will explore how discretionary traders can use technology to automate much of their trading routine without necessarily automating their actual orders. There are huge benefits to using automation without having a computer actually "pull the trigger" on your trades. Automating your daily trading routine will make you more efficient, allow you to find and trade more opportunities, and give you more confidence in your trading system-all while doing less

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