Author Topic: bitAssets = Could legally be referred/called a dark pool  (Read 2558 times)

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Offline eagleeye

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Ahh I see.. well in that context if banks are trading off of the interbank thru TITAN using the anonymous proxy via bitshares platform and then settling in USD then yea I guess that can be classified as a dark pool...

Yes can work that way if we have institution involved in terms of proof of stake ownership.

Dont just think of it in terms of institutions.  I know that may be hard to see in terms of what they say in terms of "Dark Pools" but also look at it that rich wealthy folk use dark pools.

Offline jsidhu

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Ahh I see.. well in that context if banks are trading off of the interbank thru TITAN using the anonymous proxy via bitshares platform and then settling in USD then yea I guess that can be classified as a dark pool...
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Offline eagleeye

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I already know what dark pools are I have been trading for a long time. They are used to hide orders from public.. there are "some" similarities between annonymous tx and darkpool orders but nothing that applies to assets unless like I said there was a form of an asset which only used anonymous order books and transactions from the rest of the network. It might apply when banks/hedge funds want to trade because they dont want to broadcast their orders all over the place.

jsidhu im just looking for the legal understanding of what we can define bitAssets/bitshares under so when the SEC or regulators come, we are ready.

Offline jsidhu

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I already know what dark pools are I have been trading for a long time. They are used to hide orders from public.. there are "some" similarities between annonymous tx and darkpool orders but nothing that applies to assets unless like I said there was a form of an asset which only used anonymous order books and transactions from the rest of the network. It might apply when banks/hedge funds want to trade because they dont want to broadcast their orders all over the place.
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Offline eagleeye

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Read the whole thing.  There are similarities.  Bitshares/Cryptocurrency 2.0/Asset Exchange/BitAssets are new, we can take some similarities from legalities of dark pools and make new laws.

We need to find the ability to expand, expand, and ....

Offline jsidhu

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Nah I dont think so... dark pools are a way to hide ice berg orders and intentions of large firms with bots doing arbs etc away from retail traders which are usually at the wrong end of the stick. It wouldnt really apply to the problem of annonymity in the crypto space. There would have to be a contrast for it to work as a darkpool like if a bitAsset was only applicable to banks and hedge funds with networth of more than say $100m bitUSD and they could trade bitUSD to btsx and other assets in high volume without showcasing their orders to the rest of the network (which would affect the other networks) because the darkpool orders get processed thru to the interbank the same way as "lightpool" orders... I think there would need to be an imaginary connection between a public retail bitUSD trading pool and a private dark pool for these individuals.. so they may place their large limit orders without others front running for spread profit.
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Offline eagleeye

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This isn't a private forum and anyone with Windows, OSX, or a Linux distro can freely participate. It's more public than the NYSE or the TSE.

It is private in terms of being anonymous and secret.

Offline Riverhead

This isn't a private forum and anyone with Windows, OSX, or a Linux distro can freely participate. It's more public than the NYSE or the TSE.

Offline eagleeye

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From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_liquidity)  "Dark Liquidity"

Dark liquidity
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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v t e
In finance, a dark pool (also black pool) is a private forum for trading securities that is not openly available to the public. Liquidity on these markets is called dark pool liquidity.[1] The bulk of dark pool trades represent large trades by financial institutions that are offered away from public exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, so that such trades remain confidential and outside the purview of the general investing public. The fragmentation of financial trading venues and electronic trading has allowed dark pools to be created, and they are normally accessed through crossing networks or directly among market participants via private contractual arrangements.

One of the main advantages for institutional investors in using dark pools is for buying or selling large blocks of securities without showing their hand to others and thus avoiding market impact as neither the size of the trade nor the identity are revealed until the trade is filled. However, it also means that some market participants are disadvantaged as they cannot see the trades before they are executed; prices are agreed upon by participants in the dark pools, so the market becomes no longer transparent.[2]

There are three major types of dark pools. The first type is an independent company set up to offer a unique differentiated basis for trading. The second type is a broker-owned dark pool where clients of the broker interact, most commonly with other clients of the broker (possibly including its own proprietary traders) in conditions of anonymity. Finally, some public exchanges are creating their own dark pools to allow their clients the benefits of anonymity and non-display of orders while offering an exchange "infrastructure". Depending on the precise way in which a "dark" pool operates and interacts with other venues it may be considered, and indeed referred to by some vendors as a "grey" pool.[3]

These systems and strategies typically seek liquidity among open and closed trading venues, such as other alternative trading systems. As such, they are particularly useful for computerized and quantitative strategies. Dark pools have been growing in importance since 2007, with dozens of different pools garnering a substantial portion of U.S. equity trading.[4] Dark pools are of various types and can execute trades in multiple ways, such as through negotiation or automatically (e.g., midpoint crosses, staggered crosses, VWAP, etc.), throughout the day or at scheduled times.[4]

Contents  [hide]
1 Iceberg orders
2 Dark pools
3 Price discovery
4 Market impact
5 Adverse selection
6 Pipeline LLC controversy
7 Regulatory statements
8 Barclays lawsuit
9 List of dark pools
9.1 Independent dark pools
9.2 Broker-dealer-owned dark pools
9.3 Consortium-owned dark pools
9.4 Exchange-owned dark pools
9.5 Other dark pools
9.6 Dark pool aggregators
10 See also
11 References
12 External links
Iceberg orders[edit]
Some markets allow dark liquidity to be posted inside the existing limit order book alongside public liquidity, usually through the use of iceberg orders.[5] Iceberg orders generally specify an additional "display quantity"—i.e., smaller than the overall order quantity. The order is queued along with other orders but only the display quantity is printed to the market depth. When the order reaches the front of its price queue, only the display quantity is filled before the order is automatically put at the back of the queue and must wait for its next chance to get a fill. Such orders will, therefore, get filled less quickly than the fully public equivalent, and they often carry an explicit cost penalty in the form of a larger execution cost charged by the market. Iceberg orders are not truly dark either, as the trade is usually visible after the fact in the market's public trade feed.

Dark pools[edit]
Truly dark liquidity can be collected off-market in dark pools. Dark pools are generally very similar to standard markets with similar order types, pricing rules and prioritization rules. However, the liquidity is deliberately not advertised—there is no market depth feed. Such markets have no need of an iceberg-order type. In addition, they prefer not to print the trades to any public data feed, or if legally required to do so, will do so with as large a delay as legally possible—all to reduce the market impact of any trade. Dark pools are often formed from brokers' order books and other off-market liquidity. When comparing pools, careful checks should be made as to how liquidity numbers were calculated—some venues count both sides of the trade, or even count liquidity that was posted but not filled.

Dark liquidity pools offer institutional investors many of the efficiencies associated with trading on the exchanges' public limit order books but without showing their actions to others. Dark liquidity pools avoid this risk because neither the price nor the identity of the trading company is displayed.[6]

Dark pools are recorded to the national consolidated tape. However, they are recorded as over-the-counter transactions. Therefore, detailed information about the volumes and types of transactions is left to the crossing network to report to clients if they desire and are contractually obligated.[7]

Dark pools allow funds to line up and move large blocks of equities without tipping their hands as to what they are up to. Modern electronic trading platforms and the lack of human interaction have reduced the time scale on market movements. This increased responsiveness of the price of an equity to market pressures has made it more difficult to move large blocks of stock without affecting the price.[8]

Dark pools are run by private brokerages which operate under fewer regulatory and public disclosure requirements than public exchanges.[9] Tabb Group estimates trading on the dark pools accounts for 32% of trades in 2012 vs 26% in 2008.[9]

Price discovery[edit]
For an asset that can be only publicly traded, the standard price discovery process is generally assumed to ensure that at any given time the price is approximately "correct" or "fair". However, very few assets are in this category since most can be traded off market without printing the trade to a publicly accessible data source. As the proportion of the daily volume of the asset that is traded in such a hidden manner increases, the public price might still be considered fair. However, if public trading continues to decrease as hidden trading increases, it can be seen that the public price does not take into account all information about the asset (in particular, it does not take into account what was traded but hidden) and thus the public price may no longer be "fair".

Yet when trades executed in dark pools are incorporated into a post-trade transparency regime, investors have access to them as a part of a consolidated tape. This can aid price discovery because institutional investors who are reluctant to tip their hands in lit market still have to trade and thus a dark pool with post-trade transparency improves price discovery by increasing the amount of trading taking place.[10]

Market impact[edit]
While it is safe to say that trading on a dark venue will reduce market impact, it is very unlikely to reduce it to zero. In particular the liquidity that crosses when there is a transaction has to come from somewhere—and at least some of it is likely to come from the public market, as automated broker systems intercept market-bound orders and instead cross them with the buyer/seller. This disappearance of the opposite side liquidity as it trades with the buyer/seller and leaves the market will cause impact. In addition, the order will slow down the market movement in the direction favorable to the buyer/seller and speed it up in the unfavourable direction. The market impact of the hidden liquidity is greatest when all of the public liquidity has a chance to cross with the user and least when the user is able to cross with ONLY other hidden liquidity that is also not represented on the market. In other words, the user has a tradeoff: reduce the speed of execution by crossing with only dark liquidity or increase it and increase his market impact.

Adverse selection[edit]
One potential problem with crossing networks is the so-called winner's curse. Fulfillment of an order implies that the seller actually had more liquidity behind their order than the buyer. If the seller was making many small orders across a long period of time, this would not be relevant. However, when large volumes are being traded, it can be assumed that the other side—being even larger—has the power to cause market impact and thus push the price against the buyer. Paradoxically, the fulfillment of a large order is actually an indicator that the buyer would have benefitted from not placing the order to begin with—he or she would have been better off waiting for the seller's market impact, and then purchasing at the new price.[11]

Another type of adverse selection is caused on a very short-term basis by the economics of dark pools versus displayed markets. If a buy-side institution adds liquidity in the open market, a prop desk at a bank may want to take that liquidity because they have a short-term need. The prop desk would have to pay an Exchange/ECN access fee to take the liquidity in the displayed market. On the other hand, if the buy-side institution were floating their order in the prop desk's broker dark pool, then the economics make it very favorable to the prop desk: They pay little or no access fee to access their own dark pool, and the parent broker gets tape revenue for printing the trade on an exchange. For this reason, it is recommended that when entities transact in smaller sizes and do not have short-term alpha, do not add liquidity to dark pools; rather, go to the open market where the short-term adverse selection is likely to be less severe.

Pipeline LLC controversy[edit]
The use of dark pools for trading has also attracted controversy. In one case, Pipeline LLC, a company offering its services as a dark pool, had contracted an affiliate that transacted the trades.[12] In the Pipeline case, the firm began in an attempt to provide a trading system that would protect investors from the open, public electronic marketplace. In that system, investors' orders would be made public on the consolidated tape as soon as they were announced, which traders characterized as "playing poker with your cards face up". The service Pipeline offered was to find counterparties for various trades in a private manner.

Regulatory statements[edit]
In 2009 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it was proposing measures to increase the transparency of dark pools, "so investors get a clearer view of stock prices and liquidity". These requirements would involve that information about investor interest in buying or selling stock be made available to the public, instead of to only the members of a dark pools.[13] FINRA announced in January 2013 that it will expand its monitoring of dark pools.

Barclays lawsuit[edit]
In June 2014 the U.S. state of New York filed a lawsuit against Barclays alleging the bank defrauded and deceived investors over its dark pool. The state, in its complaint, said it was being assisted by former Barclays executives and it was seeking unspecified damages. The bank's shares dropped 5% on news of the lawsuit, prompting an announcement to the London Stock Exchange by the bank saying it was taking the allegations seriously, and was cooperating with the New York attorney general.[14] In July 2014 Barclays filed a motion for the suit to be dismissed, saying there had been no fraud, no victims and no harm to anyone. The New York Attorney General's office said it was confident the motion would not succeed.[15]

List of dark pools[edit]
Independent dark pools[edit]
Instinet
Liquidnet
NYFIX Millennium
Posit/MatchNow from Investment Technology Group (ITG)
Pulse Trading BlockCross
RiverCross Securities
SmartPool
TORA Crosspoint
ETF One [16]
Broker-dealer-owned dark pools[edit]
JPMorgan Chase Bank - JPMX
Barclays Capital - LX Liquidity Cross
BNP Paribas - BNP Paribas Internal eXchange (BIX)
BNY ConvergEx Group (an affiliate of Bank of New York Mellon)
Cantor Fitzgerald - Aqua Securities
Citi - Citi Match, Citi Cross
Credit Agricole Cheuvreux - BLINK
Credit Suisse - CrossFinder
Deutsche Bank Global Markets - DBA (Europe), SuperX ATS (U.S.)
Fidelity Capital Markets
GETCO - GETMatched
Goldman Sachs SIGMA X
Knight Capital Group - Knight Link, Knight Match
Merrill Lynch - Instinct-X
Morgan Stanley - NightVision
Nomura - Nomura NX
UBS Investment Bank - UBS ATS, UBS MTF, UBS PIN
Societe Generale - ALPHA Y
Daiwa - DRECT
Wells Fargo Securities LLC - WELX
Consortium-owned dark pools[edit]
BIDS Trading - BIDS ATS
LeveL ATS
Exchange-owned dark pools[edit]
International Securities Exchange
NYSE Euronext
BATS Trading
Swiss Block[citation needed]
Nordic@Mid[citation needed]
Other dark pools[edit]
Chi-X
Turquoise
IEX
Dark pool aggregators[edit]
Fidessa - Spotlight
Bloomberg Tradebook
SuperX+ – Deutsche Bank
ASOR – Quod Financial
Progress Apama
ONEPIPE – Weeden & Co. & Pragma Financial
Xasax Corporation
Crossfire – Credit Agricole Cheuvreux
See also[edit]
Algorithmic trading
Electronic communication network
Lit pool
All or none