That's the lead line in a Bloomberg newswire story today.
Bet you don't swim in dark pools yourself. Only the biggest fish get to do that. Dark pools are off-exchange platforms that investors use to avoid revealing who they are and what they are trading. All the better to execute the trade without moving the price, which trades reported on the ticker tape tend to do. But the tape is for individual investors, who believe the markets are transparent and fair. There's one born every minute.

The big guys do it differently. They also get to execute "block trades" off market. Those are 10,000 shares or more. These are reported to the public, but that process takes time. And, as we've recently learned, there are also co-location agreements which let the big traders, for a fee, put their computers in the same room as the exchange's computers. Why? Well, do you ever get impatient waiting for a screen to appear in your internet browser? Fortunes can be made if you can avoid the few seconds of delay that occur as a message to buy or sell makes it through the net from your computer to the exchange's machine.

And then there's flash trading, another service the guys with big bucks can purchase which allows them see orders for a fraction of a second before they are posted for the masses to see. Think about how well you would do in Vegas if the dealer flashed in your direction every card she dealt. I'd take that bet. If you are a broker dealer and you do this in your order book it's called front-running and its illegal. Somehow when you pay for the information and you are taking advantage of unknown victims as opposed to taking advantage of your own customers it is not. At least not yet, the SEC is considering a ban.

The once and again highly profitable Goldman Sachs is a partner in Direct Edge, an electronic exchange which allows these so-called flash order types. It also runs a dark pool, Sigma X, and issued a statement defending these "Alternative Trading Systems" as benefiting the individual investor by reducing the transaction fees for mutual funds and other institutional traders.

It is not surprising to me that individual investors put up with this. What is surprising, is that they continue to buy stocks at all.