I spent two decades on Wall Street in various roles. One of the most eye-opening was when I ran the equity derivatives department in North America for a big investment bank called Cantor Fitzgerald.
And the reason this position was so interesting was because part of my job was designing hidden networks, where Wall Street placed multi-billion-dollar trades anonymously, called Dark Pools.
In designing these networks, every day I was observing how the flow of money was affecting prices all across our economy.
And it got to the point where I got so immersed in this world that I developed a way to track nearly every dollar in our financial ecosystem.
Most of that massive exchange of money is hidden from the American people, but it wasn’t hidden to Wall Street insiders like me who had access to these dark money movements and Dark Pools.
It was like I had a skybox watching it all happen, and I began piecing all these different money flows across different asset classes in places like the Dark Pools to see how they affected stock prices.
So, when I left Wall Street, I created a system of my own by reverse engineering what I had pieced together during my time at Cantor Fitzgerald.
To fuel that system, I found a way to tap into the Dark Pool data that shows the trades placed by the big boys on Wall Street… and track nearly every dollar that changes hands on a day-to-day basis throughout our financial ecosystem.
In other words, my system is able to see where the money is headed.
I’ll explain all this in more detail in a Special Event I’m hosting next Wednesday, Dec. 13, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time called The Dark Pool Summit.
I hope to see you then, but in the meantime, here’s how it all started.
The Phone Calls that Changed Everything
It was 2010, and I was heading a trading desk at Cantor Fitzgerald, the blue-chip New York investment bank. My job was to match big institutional buyers with sellers.
My caller was a friend who managed money at another big bank. He wanted to buy shares of a stock (we’ll call it KDQ) for one of his big clients.
Within a few minutes, I found someone who was selling 100,000 KDQ shares – about $2 million worth – and offered those to my friend. He snapped them up immediately.
“Do you have any more?” he asked.
I went back to work, dug into my “Rolodex,” and by the time the trading day closed, I had sold my friend one million shares of KDQ – valued at about $20 million.
That’s Big Money already. But I wasn’t even close to being finished.
I sold my friend another million shares the next day. And by that point, all the money flowing into this stock was lifting its price.
The same thing happened the third day … another million shares … and another bump in the price.
By the fourth day, I knew this was big – really big.
This “foraging” mission for KDQ shares continued for about a month. By the end of that stretch, I’d sought out, mopped up, and sold my friend every spare share of KDQ that I could find – around 20 million in total.
The stock had surged 70% – and people were noticing. It even made the headlines on CNBC.
I had no idea who the buyer was. I just knew it was my friend’s client.
A few days after I’d finished, I discovered that a $20 billion hedge fund had acquired more than 15% of KDQ. Through me and some of my competitors (who’d been tasked with the same mission), this fund had snapped up an aggregate 50 million shares of this stock.
And the stock price had soared.
Imagine If We Could Track These Trades
The “KDQ Affair” showed me the huge gains that were there for the taking – for investors who’d also bought the stock while that hedge fund was buying those millions of shares.
Anyone who owned KDQ on the day of the first order – or who knew what was happening so they could buy it – would have gained 70% in just four weeks.
But how could we have known?
Hedge funds and institutions are super-secretive by nature – and do everything in their power to keep their buying quiet.
This is Big Money we’re talking about – the money that actually moves stocks – so these players work to diminish the “price-increase effect” even as they keep buying shares. They spread their purchases out by buying in chunks – big chunks, but still chunks – over days or weeks.
The fact is that some people do know. These shadowy Wall Street operators are fully aware of these huge trades. And they profit off that knowledge.
The rest of us? We’re on our own. At the mercy of all these big operators.
But not anymore.
I didn’t get rich off that trade. But those four weeks and the whole KDQ Affair were a transformative event in my life. That experience put me on a mission – one that culminated in my quantitative analytics-based system and my proprietary Quantum Score that evaluates the health and potential of more than 6,000 stocks. And it does so every day the market is open.
It’s a system that I designed to spot the footprints of Big Money investors on their own KDQ-like missions. Those footprints are not visible to most other investors, who don’t know what to look for. But they are to me.
Dark Pools are essentially secret trading rooms with hidden identities. They are sort of like silent auctions. You don’t know who’s bidding, what they’re bidding, or if their bid was accepted. Yet millions of dollars’ worth of shares change hands this way, and when trades are big enough, they show up in my system.
This system is a huge advantage that gets me and my readers into stocks early – when the Big Money buying is just getting started.
It’s legal, predictive – and powerful.
I look forward to sharing much more with you at The Dark Pool Summit next Wednesday about how Big Money trades, what they do to keep things quiet, how Dark Pools work… and best of all, how you can level the playing field and use the data to your advantage.
Sincerely,
Jason Bodner
Editor, Jason Bodner’s Power Trends
P.S. I hope to see you next Wednesday, December 13, at 8:00 PM Eastern. This important Dark Pool Summit will give you the full details behind my system and how the information contained in the Dark Pools can help make you big money in 2024.
