understanding time and sales

[lechad]

Please help me to understand this.

When a block order of let's say 100 contracts is printed at a bid on Time and Sales, does it mean:

a) there was a buyer that placed one bid of 100 contracts and severals sellers sold their number of contracts at that bid, or

b) there was a number of contracts sitting at a bid and one seller sold 100 contracts at that bid, or

c) there was one order of 100 contracts placed to buy at a bid and this trade was matched by a seller who sold exactly the same number of contracts at that bid?

How the Time and Sales window will look when a bid of 100 contracts gets filled by 10 trades of 10 contracts each?

Thank you

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Hello,

Thanks for the forum post.

I will be able to briefly assist here as this question is more of a traders education question vs a technical support question for our support team.

As far as knowing if a trade is a buy or a sell you unfortunately cannot know this information as its simply not provided by the exchange. The only thing that is provided is that a trade occured and what the trade size was.

You can safely assume for the most part though that any trade that occurs on the current bid price is a sell and any trade occurring on the current ask price is buy. This is what we do with our time and sales window to color the print either green or red.

If its a block trade all 100 gets filled at the same time it will show a print of 100 otherwise it would show each print separately.

Let me know if I can be of further assistance.