I bought some more using Fidelity Active Trader Pro this morning so I could route through IEX. Except it kept immediately canceling my orders.

I was trying to do a market buy it should fill at the current market price, buying from the current lowest seller. There should be no way that this fails.

The thing about IEX is they go straight to the lit market. They don’t route to dark pools and with a market order routed through IEX the market manipulators don’t see it coming. It’s a SURPRISE! buy order that they don’t get to fuck around with.

But it kept getting immediately canceled? How? That suggests to me that the lowest seller wasn’t actually legit. The lowest sell orders must be from a dark pool and they aren’t actually willing to part with their money. They just want a small amount of sell orders to sit on the market completely unfillable, with the goal of pushing the price down. Then as buy orders react and go lower and lower, they open more sell orders that sit in dark pools and are completely unfillable.

I wanted shares so I finally did a limit order with a buy price higher than the current market price. It did go through. But the thing about limit orders is that the whole market can see them. This gives whatever supercomputer the hedge funds are running time to see the buy order open, and then in microseconds they can print out fake shares and fill the order so it gets taken off the market. Then they keep opening fake unfillable sell orders to manipulate the price lower.

At least that’s what I’m thinking. I’m attaching my order history for today so you can see the canceled market orders. Every one of them was routed through IEX.