Friday, November 26, 2010

I Knew It!

Toward the end of the day I made a comment I was getting some strange ticks going through, at first it looked like a circuit breaker, 3C dropped bad and then came up again, something I hadn't seen and I saw a few after hours trades coming through as settled trades. It was strange, I thought it had something to do with the early close, but apparently not.

Check out this article.


Again, I'm wondering if this may be part of the Dark Pool reporting mechanism? Computers and the Internet have brought trading to a computing arms race. As I've shared with you a few times, I have a relative that is on the technical operations/computing side of a a black box operation and I was surprised at the lengths they went to and the money invested to lower their latency. HFT's are like ICBMs compared to what these guys were doing.

4 comments:

bill rattray said...

I am still in LVLT. It closed above my stop but dropped in afterhours. What do yo think. Hold or dump

Brandt said...

I usually don't give too much attention to AH because of the liquidity. However, something strange is going on. I don't know whether it's contagion fears in the EU, but there was as you know a massive dump in AH. I doubt institutional money would be dumping LVLT in AH, more likely a retail panic. I would probably see what Monday morning looks like before deciding. 3C actually looked pretty good on Friday for LVLT . There's a gap around $.95, I'd rather not see it fill that gap. It also depends on your risk management/position size. Is this a big position for you or a more speculative one? If you decided to try to give it room on Monday to see if it stays above the gap, you can figure out what your acceptable risk amount would be and then reduce your shares until you get to that amount. If it will hold up Monday and take off either then or later in the week, there's nothing wrong with adding the original shares back as you'd most likely have a good bit of upside potential.

It really depends on Monday, not only did the stock market act strange after hours but GLD's volatility index, something is going on.

Feel free to email me if you want to discuss specifics of your trade.

bill rattray said...

Thanks Brandt, my position size is manageable just wanted to know what 3C looked like on Friday

Brandt said...

No problem, but keep in touch Monday, the market, if it sells off, will sell-off together, that doesn't mean the position is not good, it will depend on if it is being bought into a sell-off with 3C and where it holds support. Gaps are excellent support.