TWAP and Chaikin's Osc vs VWAP Orders and VWAP IndicatorThere are two primary Order Types that the Professional Side of the market use.
1. Time Weighted at Average Price, aka TWAP , is used extensively by the Dark Pool Buy Side, Derivative Developers, and Sell Side Banks of record for Buybacks for corporations.
The TWAP can be set at a penny to few pennies spread and pings and transacts on a specific TIME to PRICE. It can be set to time intervals shorter or longer. This is why the stock market is called "fully automated".
TWAP is used most of the time. It is rare for the Giant Institutions to use VWAP orders due to the May 2010 FLASH CRASH when a fundamental trader of e-minis accidentally hit the VWAP order type rather than the TWAP order type which caused a massive collapse of all stocks as VWAPs accelerate selling as volume increases.
2. Volume Weighted at Price or VWAP is ALSO an ORDER TYPE. It is primarily used by Small Funds Managers and Small Asset Managers who are independents trading their customers' investment money actively, often intraday. Volume Weighted at price ORDER TYPES are also automated and ping to trigger the order to transact as volume increases.
This is an easy, simple way for a busy small fund manager to cope with the complexity of buying and selling stocks with 10,000 share lots to 100,000 share lots. These are the NEW "whales" of the market.
Professional Traders Swing trade 1 million to 5 million or higher share-lot sizes. The size of the orders of the professional trader has increased significantly in the past decade.
All of you need to be aware of the market participants on the professional side as they control 80% of the 1 trillion dollars that exchange hands daily on the US Markets.
Using Chaikin's Oscillator is ideal for tracking the Dark Pool Buy Side who create the bottoms. This excellent indicator analyzes all 3 data sets: price, volume and time. Thus, it can signal early that the Dark Pools have slowly started to accumulate over time and the runs down will turn into a bottom and then pro traders will nudge price to inspire VWAP orders from the Smaller funds managers.
The VWAP INDICATOR is excellent for tracking the smaller funds managers' trading activity and it ALSO has price, volume, and time in the formula. So this is great for those of you who need an indicator for following smaller funds activity as these smaller funds VWAP orders trigger more and more volume and then runs that can move up or down for several days.
TradingView has an awesome group of indicators to use. You should customize your indicators to which market participant groups you wish to track so that you can be ready and in a position before the big runs up or down.
Trade Wisely,
Martha Stokes CMT
