What are Dark Pool Levels and How do You Find Them?

Figuring out dark pool levels for a given stock is a huge advantage for active traders and day traders. We’ll be showing you why these dark pool levels are so important and how you can find them and use them to help you profit.

What are Dark Pool Levels

To keep things short and sweet, dark pool levels are basically just the price at which all the big money is being traded off exchange. Dark pools are not accessible to retail investors and are only made available to institutional investors. These dark pools allow institutions to trade without their moves being exposed to the general public.

As far as how these dark pool levels work, when price reaches a dark pool level, it tends to get held up and consolidate before breaking above or below this level.

You could treat these dark pool levels as support and resistance levels (one could argue these are the strongest points of support and resistance) . When price breaks below or above these levels, it tends to do so with a lot of power behind the move and signals that the move in this direction is very strong.

After price rejects or breaks through a dark pool level, you can probably guess where it’s headed in the short term based on the next dark pool level either above or below where price just broke from.

All in all, price tends to gravitate towards these dark pool levels. Especially during the intraday trading session, price always seems to navigate between these dark pool levels for that given day.

How to Use Dark Pool Levels in Your Trading Strategy

While dark pool levels are super helpful and important, they are not an indicator and not a tool you can use alone to determine where price is headed. Always remember price action is key.

When implementing dark pool levels into your strategy, we recommend using them as targets, guides, and areas of support or resistance. This is the best and only way they should be implemented in your trading.

If price breaks down through a dark pool level with volume and conviction, wait for a pullback and ride the trend down. If price action rejects of a dark pool level with strong price action (ex. bullish engulfing), hop in and take calls up to the next dark pool level or point of resistance.

Use the dark pool levels as a guide and wait for price action to signal your entry, two simple key steps to live by when trading using the dark pool levels.

How to Find Dark Pool Levels

This info is hard to find for obvious reasons, and because of that it comes at a price. Nowhere online will you find real-time dark pool levels for free. But luckily there’s a few great platforms that give you this data in real-time so you’re able to capitalize as these levels are forming.

Quant Data

Quant Data is without a doubt the top platform for seeing dark pool levels on any given stock. They make things simple and easy to understand while providing all of the market flow data you could need.

While it is a paid platform, it comes with a free trial so you can jump in, use it and see it’s helpfulness first hand before paying for the platform. To couple this, their CEO Andrew Hiesinger posts these dark pool levels, along with other useful information from Quant data, daily on his Twitter account so you can see the impact the platform has on reading and analyzing stocks and the market.

After the 7-day free trial, Quant Data starts at $59.99 a month.

Cheddar Flow

Cheddar Flow is specifically designed for dark pool levels, order flows and the whole nine yards. It is just as good, if not better, that Quant Data in the dark pool regard.

Cheddar flow is another paid platform that also comes with a free trial. The layout and ease of use is a huge plus for their platform. They also post helpful data from their platform on Twitter as well, allowing you to get a sneak peek into what their platform offers.

After their 7-day free trial, Cheddar Flow starts at $75 a month when signing up for their annual plan. If you’re looking to pay month-to-month, pricing starts at $85/month.

Tradytics

While Tradytics does offer dark pool data, we really threw them on this list because we enjoy using their market net flow tool the most. When coupling their market net flow data with dark pool levels, it creates one of the most clear pictures for what the market sentiment is for not only intraday trading, but the long term outlook as well.

Tradytics doesn’t offer a free trial, but they allow you to try the site for $15 over 15 days. After that it is $69 a month.

Why You Should Care About Dark Pool Levels

Some do not care about dark pool levels and completely disregard them. There’s nothing wrong with that, there’s many different successful strategies people prefer to use. But with that being said, dark pool levels tell you exactly at what price all the big money is trading at.

With a little research, you’ll notice that price always in one way or another gravitates towards these levels and will act as a major support or resistance level before a big break through these levels.

If you’re interested in implementing or researching these dark pool levels for yourself in your trading strategy, definitely give one of the platforms listed a try, you’ll be pleasantly surprised!