I just manipulated Santacruz Silver down 3.88% on the day by making the Algo Bots trade the stock down.

First off ITG Canada, Paradigm Capital and UBS Securities all seem to be Algo Bots as they can CFO an order at the moment I put my order in, not only that but they front run my sell order.

I am represented by Credential in the samples below.

Silver is off for the day so the Bots seem to be working the offer side of the market. I tried a variety of bids but it did not attract the Bots on the buy side.

To start, the market on Santacruz was $1.29-$1.33 and I offered 1700 shares at $1.30. I do not have a screen shot of my offer in as I had not quite caught on to how I was manipulating the Bots.

As soon as my offer went in ITG hit the $1.29 bid within nanoseconds. I left my offer in at $1.30. Four minutes later I moved my offer to $1.28 and Paragon and UBS smacked SCZ down to $1.26. As you can see ITG Paragon and UBS are the only sellers.

I then cancelled my orders and put 1000 to sell at $1.27, subsequently the balance of the $1.26 bids got filled by UBS, ITG and Paragon. Then the Bots decided to print the $1.24 trades.

I opted to throw in a $1.25 offer between the bid and ask to see if the Bots would follow. Look at the time stamp on Paradigm and ITG on their CFO, 4 seconds! I also threw myself in on the buy side to see it there was any front running there. Nope.

I opted to cancel all my offers to see what would happen next. The Bots stayed at $1.25 and tapped the $1.24 bid a bit more.

I opted to throw 2700 to go at $1.27 to see what reaction I would get from the Bots. Nothing on the offer but a bit more bid tapping.

So there you have me versus 3 algorithms trying to predict what the retail guy is doing and front run it. Not only are the Bots trading against me but they are trading against themselves. By entering my order at $1.30 and manipulating my sells I managed to get the Bots to trade Santacruz down to $1.24.


Who the hell is ITG Canada you ask?

Find out here. http://www.itg.com/ Looks like they specialize in algorithmic strip mining.

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