I was looking around the TMX website this morning and came across the following press release from nearly a year ago:
Approval of Amendments to the TSX Venture Exchange Rule Book and Rules of the Toronto Stock Exchange to introduce a minimum size condition for certain dark orders
The Amendments to the TSX Venture Exchange Rule Book have been approved by the British Columbia Securities Commission and the Alberta Securities Commission and the amendments to the Rules of the Toronto Stock Exchange have been approved by the Ontario Securities Commission. The amendments allow non-displayed orders (Dark Orders) with a minimum size condition to have trading priority over other Dark Orders without such a condition, provided the Dark Orders are at the same price.
The rule amendments are effective January 13, 2012.
Can someone explain exactly how this seems to be financially ethical? I'm not fully cognizant of how dark orders work, so maybe I'm misreading this. Does it mean that an order that is not visible to Retail traders can sometimes supercede other orders that are also not visible to Retail traders IF the first order is big enough and the other orders are not? Because I guess that might actually be a good thing, if it means that someone putting in a large iceberg could prevent small hidden orders from being executed. I'm adamently opposed to HFT practices, but I guess this wouldn't help in that respect because high-frequency trades probably aren't dark orders ... they're just normal orders that are executed extremely quickly.
Developments in the markets over the past decade sometimes just make me want to pull all of my money out of the stock markets altogether. It seems that every year, the game is more and more rigged against the individual investor.
