This episode’s opening bell tackles a topic that sounds more mysterious than it actually is: dark pools. Mark, drawing on a conversation he’d had earlier in the week with some advisers, walks through what these alternative trading systems (ATSs, authorized under Reg ATS) actually do — letting buyers and sellers transact without displaying their orders publicly beforehand, while still reporting the trade to the tape within 90 seconds. He’s direct about pushing back on the ominous reputation the name suggests: dark pools aren’t some unregulated shadow market, they’re a deeply established, 30-year-old part of U.S. market structure, and they’re approaching roughly half of all equity market share. The core use case, he explains, is protecting large orders from being front-run — if you’re trying to buy ten million shares of anything, announcing that intention on a lit exchange is a great way to watch the price run away from you before you’re done buying.
Lex and Mark also get into the more skeptical retail take on dark pools — the idea that they hide directional signals or let someone with an information edge quietly build a position. Mark’s answer is grounded and a little deflating for the conspiracy-minded: every dark pool trade still has a buyer and a seller on opposite sides, and volume alone doesn’t tell you which side had the edge, if either did. He does allow that there’s a legitimate structural question worth asking — if enough volume shifts away from the lit markets, does that hurt the public market’s ability to discover an accurate price? — but notes dark pools still lean on lit-market pricing to set their own trades, which keeps the system anchored.
The guest segment brings on Scott Clark of Trade Stewart, an automated options trading platform built around three components: a bot that executes rules-based strategies, a backtesting engine called Backtick that uses one-second data on S&P index options, and performance tracking to tie the two together. Scott’s pitch centers on control — traders define exactly what they want (strikes by delta, premium, or width; multi-leg structures; entry filters that avoid FOMC days or overnight VIX spikes) and the platform checks for entry conditions every ten seconds and monitors for exits every half second, without requiring any code. The episode doubles as a product announcement: Tradier and Trade Stewart have struck a sponsorship deal giving Tradier’s Pro Plus customers free access to Trade Stewart’s typically $99-a-month subscription.
Scott is candid that the tool isn’t meant to teach anyone options trading from scratch — it executes whatever strategy a trader already has conviction in, for better or worse, and he recommends starting small and simple (a short put, say) rather than deploying it at full size on day one. The episode closes with a speed round covering everything from Scott’s favorite Greek (Delta) to a surprising past life running a ballet studio, followed by a Beyond the Bell segment built around a dark, structured Bandol rosé that gets more attention than most of the trades discussed all episode.
