Your question - "What is an iceberg order?":

An iceberg order is when you put in a huge Bid order pretending to buy, or a huge Ask order pretending to sell, which has a big influence on moving the Bids and Asks in the market.

If the price is 91 cents (which it is as I write this now), and National Bank puts in a Bid offering to buy 25,000 shares at 90 cents (as they did this morning), it forces anyone else that wants to buy just a few shares right now (e.g. 2,000), to bid at a slightly higher price, e.g. 92, 93, 94, 95 cents. National's iceberg pushes up the prices Bid.

But National Bank may likely have no intention at all of wanting to actually buy any of the 25,000 shares at 90 cents. Instead, they actually want to sell! But they want to sell at 95 cents instead of the current 91.

So their "iceberg" at 90 cents means all the other small Bids are artificially pushed up towards 95 cents. It's not a truly realistic price - it's one that National is creating. National happily sells at 95 cents ... and then cancels their iceberg.

I've asked whether it's legal and it seems to be grey. After all, they're keen to sell at 95 and they're making it seem like they'll buy at 90 (not really though) - sell high, buy low,- who can criticize that?

I am not saying National is bad per se - all the big pros do this. Professional traders trade.

Sometimes the word iceberg is used to describe an accumulation of legitimate orders - e.g. 25,000 or 250,000 shares Bid because a bunch of different people want to actually buy at a certain price.

However, here I was using it in the context of what we usually see in a quiet market - the pros pushing the price around.

Hope that helps - let me know if I can make it clearer.

People use icebergs to either sell (by putting in an oversize but "fake" buy order like National) or buy (by putting in an oversize sell order).

Me, I don't think I can fight the pros.

It's like driving deer out of the forest so you can hunt them easily - using "Beaters" whacking their sticks to scare the animals out. Interesting - politicians use the same technique. The Roman Caesar Cassius Dio paid the Greeks to attack the Romans - to attack his own army. People panicked - so Caesar was given infinite powers. Caesar then stopped paying the Greeks to attack him and was happy to use his infinite powers.

Ditto with Bush - at the risk of upsetting a lot of people, I go along with 9/11 being and inside job (same as Gulf of Tonkin has now been proved, cf. the Vietnam War). He got his Patriot Act and War on Terror and end of Habeus Corpus, and that was the last of anything in the news about "Osama".

Iceberg orders are the equivalent in the penny stock market. Karl Icahn does the same thing with greenmail in the very liquid stocks. With KXL, we get pushed around very easily - e.g. me, today, by National Bank! I am saying that with a smile.

Love to know what else the wise people here have learned about icebergs / all best