How Many of you get Front-Run on Listed Stocks? NBL I got Front Run!

R

RabidTrader

Do you ever notice any front-running or bids getting destroyed when you try to sell stocks that are not in a big uptrend but are sticking around certain price points? The Market Maker for NBL seemed odd today vs the MM for BGS, TVIZ and many other great stocks where you get a quick fill and don't have the bids magically disappear when you go to sell it!

What's your experience, I've seen this so many times its totally crazy, have you dealt with this madness?

Who does Interactive Broker use as their Market Maker or do their route out instead, usually I'am good about Limit-Orders but today certain stocks begin to move and if you don't pay up, you miss the good sell price or buy prices. Thank you!
 
Interactive Brokers has its own "market maker" -- it's called Timber Hill, and it actually existed long before the brokerage itself. I doubt they'd front-run you so blatantly, but then again you can never tell (and I do mean you can never tell, no matter what any company says, as it only takes one rogue employee to do this -- just ask the former clients of Pipeline or ITG Posit, who were "sophisticated institutional clients" yet were tricked anyway).

That IB and Timber Hill are under the same ownership is a "potential conflict of interest" that you may not encounter at certain "institutional" brokerages. However, most (if not all) of the big "retail" discount brokers such as Ameritrade or Fidelity sell the majority of their order flow to "wholesalers" to trade against the client -- this also is a conflict of interest. Such practices allow brokers to market "$9.99 trades" even if the real cost to the client, when including the average cost of poor execution, is far more than $9.99.

What you might consider is getting a quote feed that tells you which exchange is on the best bid or offer, then routing the order to that exchange directly (a "directed order"). You could also try another broker side-by-side and see what happens in similar situations.
 
I wrote this incorrectly, it was not IBKR and I know their great about order-flow, the Broker I am talking about is one of those discount ones that do have problems filling size and don't like to pay ECN fees on limit orders, can you blame them?

Please understand my wording was poor, I should have made the note I wanted to know what Traders who love IBKR have to say about their order-flow. I hear lots of great things about IBKR, I use to have problems with brokers who had their own Market Makers, GVRC is one of the most horrible Market Makers I remember from the past. UBS has treated me fairly and there's a couple of players trying to enter the MM field instead of price matching or internalization, sorry for not making this clear!
 
uptik2000 said:
NBL did have some unusual activity in the stock and options on Friday.
What order type are you using? Mkt, lmt? Destination?
More...
'


This was both the common stock and option orders, the bid is $30.53 x $30.55 I throw out a Market order 3000 shares and get filled at $30.57 and the bid x ask return to $30.53 x $30.55. There was size on the offer, on options they jumped in front of me constantly, their orders popped up before mine and mine was a better offer. I have Esignal and even Esignal was reflecting their offer ahead of mine.

9
I was trading the September $30s and trying to buy them was commical, someone knew our orders were coming and would jump ahead of us. Did you notice this week that Oil Stocks are starting to calm down? I think it might be time to gentely add some LINE,BBEP, VNR, CWEI, COP, TOT, CLR, WLL as they are getting collected.


On Friday here is what I bought so you can see my style and why front-running really don't bother me as much as it would someone who is Scalping!

CCL Oct $48s, MDLZ December $42, MSFT BGS Oct-Nov $35s How do you read these quotes, Auto means someone like me who is buying or selling. I got 8 contracts of MDLZ by patiently bidding, BGS there was no time to bid you had to pay up. NBL was nutty, I tried to sell my shares at $30.90 during a fraction of silence, once my 3000 shares hit the $30.90 not one share got filed, they all sold down to $.78 just like that!

The bid and ask on this Option was $1.70 x $1.75 and when I bought all my contracts they got filled at $1.70, what did that mean?
upload_2015-9-5_15-46-0.png








0.90
 
uptik2000 said:
NBL did have some unusual activity in the stock and options on Friday.
What order type are you using? Mkt, lmt? Destination?
More...

How does one get front-run on a limit order...assuming that the limit order is above or at the last trade price?

Rabid,
I think you got plenty of time to get into NBL. If I wanted to get in though, instead of placing a market or limit order, why not take advantage of the current high IV and sell an ATM or ITM put?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top