what's the point of this "exercise"? you don't believe it? one more time-you hide your order-you lose any priority. you display your order-"they" will subpenny you,if you right about upcoming price move.
now-in order for you to get a fill-the trade should take a place at exchange,where you order is sitting. mean-the seller for whatever reason have to route his order to this market center. according to this lewis guy-we have over 80 various exchanges,dark pools,ecn's etc.one more time-they all trade same shares,same 3000 or so companies,that use traded at NYSE,NASDAQ. the more exchanges-the less your chances you have to get any shares. how difficult this to understand?
there is nothing really special about this situation,where they can and will trade trough. bidder can sit on some other exchange and seller routing engine simply sends his order to that exchange. if you not in this exchange with your hidden order-no match,no fill. when you submit your order(to buy)-really smart routing should analyze,where best NBBO is now and send your order to this market center. but again-many of them aren't paying any commissions and fees,might see upcoming order and can change\spread up the orders across multiple exchanges in a fraction of a second,if they sniff even a slight sign of competition. IB's smart is not so smart. from my experience -it's just dumps all hidden orders to the ISLAND.
i was thinking about solution that would improve my fill ratio,but not sure,if it worth it at this point. it have to be something like this-you request a data from all sources separately via API,you have to figure out where is best bid is sitting(at what exchange) and then(assuming that they do accept hidden orders and they are native to exchange)-you either: route your order via API to that exchange and get charged extra fee or -submit it as a smart and hoping(bad word in trading) that you order will be routed to a same exchange.btw-there is no way to analyze,if you order was routed to the correct exchange either. cause API doesn't report where your order is routed,if submitted as smart. one will need a combo or recorded live data + analysts of his own audit file at EOD to get an idea of how his orders are handled by IB system.. was it worth it? to me-probably not.
even if i do all above-from what i've seen-HFT can and will scan every price level at every exchange in a fraction of a second. if you need a perfect example of how quick they do that-try to submit your order in premarket in situation,where there is a imbalance at open. and see how long will it take. instant fill and open price will be far away from you,causing instant loss. i've seen it many times.
ps-i'm not talking about futures or super liqud etf's. i'm talking about low\average volume common stocks. 50-250K a day shares average