Pattern Recognition And Tape Reading Skill. When there is a real institutional buyer or seller in a stock, they never show their hand until they are almost done. Think about it, a real buyer is not going to say to the world, look at me, I have so much stock to buy, please lift all the offers so I have to pay up to get my stock. No, he is showing that bid because he has been buying the stock all day with no bids and now, that is all the stock he has left and wants to get hit. And he will get hit. When you see these bids, you sell into them hard all day long provided the stock is weak and you know there are sellers in the stock. Trying to buy stocks with large bids and sell stocks with large offers is a sign of a dumb trader that jumps in front of size only to see that size hit and then quickly is sitting on a losing trade. Most of the time, especially with small and mid cap stocks, you would see 100 shares on the bid or maybe 300 shares on the bid, and it would be stepping up all day long. You never see the bid get hit, or if you did, you would see 300 shares bid, then 2k shares would go off at the bid and he would still be there with 300 bid. Very classic. This guy has a lot of stock to buy. And he would never show his hand. When a large offer would show up, the dumb traders would quickly run to sell. The buyer would be there or the specialist buying all the cheap shares from the dumb traders. When the dumb traders were done selling, the 300 share bid would step to the size offer and suddenly the offer would get lifted in one print, bamm, gone. Now those 300 shares are stepping up again and the dumb traders are all bitching about how the stock is manipulated. This would go on all day every day. The dumb traders would never learn. If the stock is strong and near the high of the day, you would be looking to buy the stock. But in general, even if the stock is strong, if he is showing size, it means that is probably all he has left and he will be done and the stock will trade lower the rest of the day. Remember, the reason the buyer is showing his hand is because he has already bought all his stock. He will never show his hand if he still has stock to buy. Would you? When there is a buyer in the stock he usually has a level where he wants to buy the stock. As the day goes on and other buyers come into the stock, this level goes higher and higher, hence the bid stepping up. The key is to find these levels. They usually are not at round numbers and they are not at key support levels. It could be something like 100.57. You will notice there is a bid at .55 for 200 shares and you will see large prints going off at .57. You will never see the stock trade at the bid. This is your buyer. You would want to be buying the stock around this area. And since you know the buyer is resting at .57, as soon as the price trades, you know to get out. Pattern recognition skills are very important. You need to find the pattern. Every specialist is different. One of the things you will notice with very strong or a very weak stock is the charts are very smooth. If you are seeing a lot of volatility, there probably isn't a real buyer there, but rather a lot of momentum traders. You may be fooled by the size. You might mistake them for large institutions. The difference is, traders may trade size, but there is nothing behind it that is why the stocks drop so fast and go back and forth. If it were a real fund with hundreds of thousands of shares to buy or millions, they would be bid for that stock. You wouldn't see sharp drops. Being able to know the difference is paramount. Specialist knows that the buyer has size to buy and he is going to help him work the order. The specialist knows who the size players are. He knows who the buyers and sellers are and how much stock they have to buy and sell. That is his job. The specialist is also interesting in making money and if he has a big buyer at his post, he is going to want to buy as much stock as he can. Now how he is going to accomplish that if he is showing the full size of the buyer? The specialist cannot get long on an uptick and cannot get short on a downtick. He needs to buy on downticks. He needs you to sell your stock to him. He will never show you the size of the buyer. He will do everything he can to make the stock look weak. He will step up on 100 or 200 shares. Tape reading has not changed in a 100 years. The bottom line is, real institutional buyers and sellers never show their size until they are done. It's all patterns. When a buyer is accumulating stock, he will usually bid in even amounts; you will see 500 or 300 on the bid. Keep in mind, this is a trick, he has far more than 300 shares to buy. But what you will see are the prints, 5k goes off, 10k goes off, 25k goes off, so on. When he is done, he will show you his bid. And this bid will usually be an odd number. When you see a size bid show up for 13,600 shares. Hit that bid as fast as you can. He's done! Now if you see him come back for 300 shares because he has been bidding 300 all day. You might want to get back in. Also, other things to look for are uptick bids. If you are still seeing uptick bids, he is still there. The key here is pattern recognition. You have to identify the patterns. It's very much like a game of chess. He will telegraph his moves. You just have to catch them.