What are BOTS exactly?

[agro]

i was told bots are brokers that don't pay brokerage fees but how does that work?

i am watching a stock atm and alot of small parcels going through under $500..

thoughts?

 

[Timmy]

There was a small thread about them recently - just digging around to find it now...not a huge amount of info on it but its a start.

This is it, thread here has some info

 

[Trembling Hand]

BOTS = trading robots.

Basically a computer program that trades with out direct input from a human.
They are programed to achieve many different things. From accumulation of large shares in small parcels, market making, arbitrage, smashing the futures to bits (around option expiry) etc.

From wikipedia,
A third of all EU and US stock trades in 2006 were driven by automatic programs, or algorithms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

If you are a maths or physics whiz you can get a nice couple of mil $$ job on Wall Street programing BOTS to beat humans. c:

 

[marklar]

The term "BOT" came from the early days of the Internet when chat was purely text based (Internet Relay Chat or IRC for short) servers were few and hosted hundreds of channels. Each channel had one or more operators with special permission (ops, kick, ban, etc.) to moderate other users' activity, the first person to create the channel was automatically the Op.

Several people programmed robots (eventually shortened to "bot") that would keep the channel open while they were logged out, automatically grant Ops privileges to authorised individuals when they joined, automatically greet new people as they joined, kick or ban people if they used offensive language, answer frequently asked questions, etc. Many of these bots had very extensive programming behind them and were actually quite intelligent. Google for "eggdrop" and "irc" for some more background.

m.

 

[xyzedarteerf]

The term "BOT" came from the early days of the Internet when chat was purely text based (Internet Relay Chat or IRC for short) servers were few and hosted hundreds of channels. Each channel had one or more operators with special permission (ops, kick, ban, etc.) to moderate other users' activity, the first person to create the channel was automatically the Op.

Several people programmed robots (eventually shortened to "bot") that would keep the channel open while they were logged out, automatically grant Ops privileges to authorised individuals when they joined, automatically greet new people as they joined, kick or ban people if they used offensive language, answer frequently asked questions, etc. Many of these bots had very extensive programming behind them and were actually quite intelligent. Google for "eggdrop" and "irc" for some more background.

m.

hahaha yeah i remember those days , nuke, ping flood, ghost,clones,hijack channel, yeah those were fun times, when you hated a user you simple nuke there IP and gets them disconnected from the server. sorry off topic.

 

[Wysiwyg]

One thing different now with "bots" is how they print a bar/candle inconsistent with true price action. Longer tails and wider range as they buy at next available price rather than where *normal trading takes place. Like a $27.45 buy to close the day on a high.

* Normal trading meaning $500 parcel and up

 

[Logique]

It's the weirdest thing as a trader when the quoted market depth on one side is all bot driven, eg same size parcel at each price.

It's like..seriously I'm negotiating a transaction with a computer as the other side..!?

 

[skc]

Interesting article on SMH about high frequency trading.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/trad...-just-sharemarket-madness-20110318-1c0cu.html

From trading in milliseconds, to microseconds, to nanoseconds, speeds are getting faster all the time. ''There are no technological limits preventing firms from trading in picoseconds,'' said Donal Byrne, chief executive officer of Corvil.

For those of us who get our picos mixed up with our nanos, a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. Or, put another way, a picosecond is to one second what one second is to 31,700 years. In less technical language, it's a really, really brief period of time.