hunting stops

i was reading PeterFM's post about brokerage house can hunt your stops...is that legal? i mean if you place a long with 50 pips stops below, the house can manipulate the in house data feed and pocket your stop?

sorry, what i mean is they hunt your stops to enter a position with a favorable price. for example if the house wants to long 1000 lots cable and you're have a 10 lots sell stop 100 pips below the current price, the house can just take your stop along with other retail joe's stops for their house long trade?

Brokers can manipulate prices by giving false quotes if they want, but if they do that, they will soon lose all their business. So they don't do it. Frankly they don't even need to do such things, all they need to do is provide the best trading conditions for the trader and they can still make a lot of money from trader's losses.

Companies may be able to give false prices but there are limits. You can check prices anywhere in the world from hundreds of sources. If a company was posting false prices it would be easily seen because their prices would be significantly different from everyone elses. There are some price differences because of software, internet feeds, server quality, area of the world etc. but it shouldnt be significantly different.

I agree with your basic premise but it seems if you run your stops too tight the program will go for it. I was with a company that seemed to do this all the time. Price would go exactly to my stop and then turn around. I posted demo accounts from a dozen companies of several different platform types and entered the same trade on all of them. Some would go up and hit the stop, some would not. I went with a company that did not do that. They went within 3 pips of it and then reversed and I made a profit. It seems if you post tight stops the program will go after them with some companies but if you give big stops it wont. Just an observation.