With Regards to the Question Earlier, Whether Markets are Rigged …

To u/Timelord1000 and others who may be interested in some ideas on this phenomenon …

It's not that they're trading against you specifically. Insider HFs and MMs sometimes/often trade against the aggregate positions of retail and small fish. Usually they get away with it, but ocassionally some other big fish might catch them out.

But the short answer is: YES. The game is rigged. Your trading platform very likely uses your data adversely against their customers; backroom deals are done with social influencers (Cramer anyone?); patterns and indicators can be set up specifically to appear a certain way.

So let's make something abundantly clear …

Anyone who has done even a cursory glance at the 2008 catastrophe, should be shocked that not a single person went to jail over the vast fraud that was happening. And the regulatory captured revolving door bureaucracy systematically removed numerous regulatory checks on quite alot of activities.

Taking this a step further …

Corporate structures and codes are often game-able. Often the loopholes are written by the people who will exploit them, other times they just find gray areas to get around stuff that's supposed to be illegal. Still other times, like in 2008, there's some entities that are just “too big to prosecute.” And/or these entities exploit some level of regulatory capture.

This is not a theory, this is not an opinion. This is absolutely a fact, and the history is unequivocal. Slightly more theoretical is which companies are doing what kinds of activities that might be unscrupulous at any given moment.

Investigating tradfi insider / corporate structure is not my schtick, so I'm not accusing any particular company/entity of any particular thing. So chill a moment before smashing the downvote.

Big fish feed on retail traders. There's alot to exploit. Some of it is legal, some of it isn't. Very little of the 2008 fraud was really dealt with or fixed (there were token measures, there always are).

So be aware of these realities before putting your own money on the line in a trading environment.