It's manipulation by definition. These hidden trades exist to prevent other people from being able to act in their own best interest based on available information. This isn't about what's going on in your neighbor's house. Your neighbor's house is private, markets are public. This is about being at a public auction in the middle of bidding on something when someone else walks up to the crier, whispers a few words in his ear, and then the crier just quietly says "bidding is closed" and you have no idea who bought the item or for what price but now you have to try to price similar items.
In the case of Dark Pools, it would actually be the crier saying "a lot 10x the size of what I'm auctioning just traded somewhere else where none of you lot can trade for xx price". So after they say that you actually do know the price that they bought the item(s). This is since the dark pools have requirements to report to the trade tapes their trades in fairly similar latency to the exchanges themselves.
EDIT: The rules also dictate the allowed prices the dark pools trade at. They have to be within the national BBO, they can't just trade at whatever price they want. So the public auction is actually helping them find the prices, without their pre-trade information affecting the price before execution.
Not manipulation as most/all of these execute around the NBBO. Exceptions exist for extreme block trades that may give some price advantage do to the sheer scale but we are not talking about manipulation.
I can easily see the retail price of a good, I can go to a wholesaler or some other holder of this good and ask them if I can buy it at a cheaper price. They might tell me to kick rocks if I don't have volume. Pretty similar to a dark pool. Markets are both private and public everywhere.
Your analogy is bad because this doesn't happen at a public place. People can't privately sell goods between each other. If someone someone sells their gold to a gold buying shop, that was not a public auction, yet people are still able to price gold.
>It's manipulation by definition. These hidden trades exist to prevent other people from being able to act in their own best interest based on available information.
So if I have a RTX 4090 to sell (a very sought after commodity these days), and I sell it to my buddy rather than listing it on ebay, I'm doing market "manipulation"?
Most things are different from each other. Why does that difference matter in this case? It looks a lot like traders trading in a market. That isn't manipulation.
That isn't so; I looked up an RTX 4090 on Ebay [0]. The only information I see related to depreciation is "Used: An item that has been used previously" and a representation from the seller that they weren't using it for crypto, suggesting that the seller (and the buyer; this looks like a standard graphics card listing to me) are treating used graphics cards as fungible.
If it causes "no liquidity" in the open market because nvidia (tsmc) can only produce so many GPUs / month and that causes nvidia's other cards to have a street price of 2x MSRP due to lack of availability? I would say yes.. It's just that "H100" or "RTX 5090" is not a registered stock with the SEC, so there aren't specific laws / penalties for manipulating the GPU market.
Same as "10 per store" limits when PS5s or whatever are in short supply, but then the CEO calls up the warehouse to get one for every student in their kid's class.
