Quote from logic_man:
So an individual employee will risk losing the job to reverse engineer your strategy?
How many of these cases have there been?
And, to go back to my first point, unless my strategy involves chasing a single tick, I don't see how it hurts me for others to be trading in my direction. For any given trade that is made, 99.9% of the volume that will happen between the instant that trade is made and when it is exited happens after the instant it is made. So, all of that volume, and the trader sentiment it represents, swamps anything that happens the instant you make your trade. Whether your trade turns out to be a winner or a loser depends on what happens after you make the trade, not what happens simultaneously.
Let's say you hold a trade for 10 minutes and your instrument trades 100K shares, lots, whatever over that 10 minutes. That means 10K units every 1 minute. You trade at 1 particular second within the 1 minute block your trade gets executed, which implies that there are ~167 (10K/60) units trading within that 1 second, some in your direction, some in the opposite direction.
So, you are saying that what ultimately happens to your 10 minute-long trade is dependent on what happens during the time .167% of the units are traded?
Again, come on, this isn't that complicated.