Retail trader’s invisible fight with market markers

What I got from the first video (haven't watched the 2nd one) is:
This poker player ought to stick to his poker because he is a terrible interviewer.
The marketmaker sounds better in the early stages of the interview than the latter. At first he was thoughtful, but by the end he couldn't shut up. The lessons I learned were:
1. My paranoia is fully justified; I am being manipulated when I think I am.
2. To beat marketmakers you need to be less greedy than you think you can be. $4 in your pocket is better than $6 possible.
3. Retail trading is gambling against the house
4. You can beat the house sometimes, but you can't beat the house all of the time.
 
VicBee said:
The lessons I learned were:
1. My paranoia is fully justified; I am being manipulated when I think I am.
2. To beat marketmakers you need to be less greedy than you think you can be. $4 in your pocket is better than $6 possible.
3. Retail trading is gambling against the house
4. You can beat the house sometimes, but you can't beat the house all of the time.
More...

Why fight ?

"If you can't beat them join them"

Look for big volume, wait for 1000am, and follow the trend the market makers created !

Instead of beating them sometimes, join them always...
 
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VicBee said:
What I got from the first video (haven't watched the 2nd one) is:
This poker player ought to stick to his poker because he is a terrible interviewer.
The marketmaker sounds better in the early stages of the interview than the latter. At first he was thoughtful, but by the end he couldn't shut up. The lessons I learned were:
1. My paranoia is fully justified; I am being manipulated when I think I am.
2. To beat marketmakers you need to be less greedy than you think you can be. $4 in your pocket is better than $6 possible.
3. Retail trading is gambling against the house
4. You can beat the house sometimes, but you can't beat the house all of the time.
More...

To be completely fair, he mentions that his usual manipulations were on illiquid markets, normally on stocks on companies that had a very low volume. There are a lot of market makers and they all play against each other, so he could do his traps on markets where he was alone providing liquidity.

Now, he is no longer a market maker and he mentions that started retail trading a couple of years ago in the futures market, "micros to learn and minis to bank" (literal quote). If he is no longer doing it and started retail trading is because he went bust.

Market makers go bust like any other company for unplanned exposure, they are not infallible.

So there is a market if you play highly liquid futures where there is no OTC nonsense. Index futures essentially. For the ones that do stocks he didn't point to any market but my guess will be to follow the same rule and look for markets where there are plenty of market makers, so it is harder to be manipulated.

I went to listen to several videos and forgot on which one it was, but he answered several questions from the audience, and in one of them he mentioned that the usual bid/ask battle that we see on the level 2 is coming from several market makers trying to push a market in one direction. So it is not all lost if we trade on the busiest markets. They will eat each others neck.

If you go for penny stocks, he calls us "fresh meat" , so there you go, self explanatory.
 
Agree that liquid and high volume markets cannot be easily manipulated. That’s why I only trade equities with at least 10 million shares volume/day and no stocks less than $10/share.

With that said, the human psychology and market actions (tricks & traps) are still present in all markets to varying degrees. It’s helpful to have a clear understanding of those if you trade actively.
 
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Is it manipulating only when price goes up when you want to buy or down when you want to sell, and not when it happens inversely - price down when buying, price up when selling?

Supermarkets have Bogo specials all the time. Guess the customers that shopped a day after the special deal expired were ummm manipulated. :p Whine with that cheese - aisle 8.

o_O
 
Well considering that they are our fodder, it's important that they get to make some money too. If we retail traders make too much money and bankrupt them, who's going to take the other side of our transactions? You do not want to win so much that you become the market. Once you become the market, you are screwed.
 
Drawdown Addict said:
I've listened to four of them and so far I found at least a useful sentence per video. Something that I knew already but it is good to see someone confirming it.
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A bullet point list would be most appreciated - let's compound that time you invested!
 
SunTrader said:
Is it manipulating only when price goes up when you want to buy or down when you want to sell, and not when it happens inversely - price down when buying, price up when selling?
More...

They do it in both directions.

What they do is that in the morning before the open they look at the orders that they need make market for, and then they’ll take the price in the opposite direction as much as they can (they intentionally start trading against the direction they want to trade).

Say for example they have lots of buy orders, so when the market opens, the market maker will start selling and driving the price as low as he can, and then he will start buying with size at much better prices. (With size, I don't mean that you'll necessarily see large volume spike, they don;t want others to know that they're screwing us, but usually you can spot it if you know what to look for).

They not only do this at the open with retail orders, institutions have guys on the floor and they also do similar games/tricks when they get instructions to fill large orders (which can take days/weeks to fill).

If they get a very large order (say buy order), they’ll work with the institutions and they’ll try to break a support level to get the retail traders (and smaller hedge funds) to sell, and once the sell orders are triggers, then they’ll slowly start buying so they can A) buy at discounted prices, B) so they can attempt to fly under the radar with their volume. The institution which is working the large order into the market doesn't want other institutions to know, so their guys in on the floor often needs to back off, and very rarely will the institution chase the price, they'll just back off if they can't get the price they want.

Fortunately, the institutions are like elephants and they cannot hide, and therefore volume is very important when it comes to reading PA in mega-caps.

PS: the 1rst hour reversals caused by market makers very reliable patterns.
 
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