Large funds, insurance companies, mutual funds, and pension funds must use algorithms in order to get good prices on huge amounts of stock. The algo's hide as best as they can their intention sin the market whether they are buying or selling. The algo's also try and find liquidity in numerous dark pools and open markets as fast as they can.. much faster than you or I could ever watch and type out buy sell orders etc. A large majority of these algos are produced by the ecn's and dark pools and institutions and NOT THE FUNDS. Here are a few explained:
Hopefully this gives a litel clarification on some of the popular algo's being used by trading desk.. there are numerous others utilised by hedge funds etc to try and profit from spreads, arbs, etc
