Dark Pools - Big Money Footprints

Dark pools sound shady. They are not illegal, they are just quiet. They exist so big players can move size without torching the price in public. If you understand that, you stop treating them like a conspiracy and start treating them like information.

A dark pool is an off exchange venue where institutions and large traders cross shares away from the public order book. Instead of flashing their full size on the tape and chasing the price up or down, they match orders in the dark, then report the trade after the fact. The goal is simple: reduce market impact.

These prints show up as large block trades at specific prices, often clustered around key levels. That is where it gets interesting. Dark pool activity tells you where serious money was comfortable doing business. It shows you the “real” volume that never hit the lit book.

Why do they exist? Because if a fund wants to buy a few million shares of a name like NVDA, spraying that all over the public market would send the price flying and raise their cost. Same on the sell side. Dark pools let them negotiate size and price with less slippage.

For traders using platforms like Equity Flow, dark pool prints become a map of hidden supply and demand. A heavy block cluster just below current price can act like hidden support. A wall of dark pool volume above price can behave like real resistance. The market remembers where size traded, even if it did not flash live.

You should not worship every dark print. But if you ignore them completely, you are trading without seeing where the biggest footprints are.