Dark Pool

What it is

Off-exchange block prints reported to FINRA for the 25 most liquid names we track. When an institution wants size without moving the tape, it trades away from the lit exchanges — those prints still have to be reported, and this is where they surface.

What you see

• Net lean: Notional bought minus notional sold, rolled up per ticker. Green is accumulation, red is distribution.
• Print size and notional: How big each block was.
• % of ADV: The print measured against the name's average daily volume, so a $40M block in a mid-cap reads differently from the same block in SPY.

Read the lean as an inference, not a report

FINRA publishes no venue and no aggressor side. Nothing in the feed says "this was a buy". The lean is inferred by comparing each print's price against the prior session's close — above it leans accumulation, below it leans distribution. That is a reasonable heuristic and it is not the same thing as knowing who initiated.

So treat a strong lean as a question worth following up, not a conclusion. Cross-reference it with options flow on the same ticker in Ticker Search: two independent sources agreeing is the actual signal.

Two honest caveats

• The tape is row-capped. When a session exceeds the cap the oldest prints are dropped, and the net lean for that window is computed from what survived. The page tells you when this has happened — believe it.
• Dark-pool prints are not directional forecasts. A large cross can be a hedge, an index rebalance, a portfolio transition, or one fund handing stock to another. Size means something happened; it does not tell you what happens next.