From time to time I return to consideration of time and sales in the hopes that I will see something there. In my most recent attempt I progressively increased the volume filter, in hopes that looking at only large trades might yield some insight into what the smart money was doing. That assumes that the smart money could be trading via market orders. What I found was wholly unexpected: isolated machine-gun-like barrages of orders in the 20-50 car range. These mostly appeared to occur on possible breakouts of narrow consolidations, but were so short lived, apparently being reversed almost immediately, that I could not tell if they were scalps or aborted trades. Rarely did they seem to yield a profit. Has anyone else observed this, and if so, do you understand what might be happening? I am inclined to think that it is hedging rather than trading, as the profit is not there. Also, the very largest trades, of say 100 cars, seem universally to be at tops or bottoms, but in the wrong direction, that is short at a bottom and long at a top. These are market orders, mind. TIA.
