re: Day/swing trading

What I mostly do now is route trades to exchanges that provide liquidity rebates back on cost of trade. Also, route to dark pools to hide my protective orders from the main exchange, and disguise the amount of shares.

When the "flash boys" (IEX) was hard to get to, I used this a lot. Almost anyone can get to IEX now, so not really an exclusive, but I doubt someone on TD or ETrade can.

IB has about half a dozen dark pools you can either smart route to, or direct trades to. I direct trades as smart routing would defeat my purpose for hiding my protective sell orders. Smart routing is just going to match the trade with best pricing.

But if IB let's me do this, anyone on IB can do this. e.g. retail investors. There are literally thousands of other private trading platforms that retail people don't have access to. I believe prices are supposed to get reported, but in practice they don't. Banks had some scrutiny due to this in the last several years. One claimed they had their own exchange for purposes of making a market for their own equity, which was later disproven. Banks lie, and there are two sets of rules. That's just a basic fact of life, and when this is understood both emotionally and intellectually, this makes retail investing more clear as to strategy.

I guess the other use I would have is if I needed to get out of a large core holding in a hurry by using volume weighted average pricing.

To oversimplify, it is merely a private electronic exchange. Supposedly to add liquidity, and probably does with large financial institutions who make extremely large trades, and allows for the traditional market to not be influenced by these trades. But an algorithm could certainly arbitrage, and can certainly hide what the average guy would consider critical pieces of information.

I don't think there is any law that says if I own 10000 MMM, and I want to sell them, I need to sell them in a public equity market. Nor do I need to let everyone know where my stop loss is at. Or if I have covered calls for sale on the same security. Or if I'm long / short. Etc.