Aren't the banks interested in hunting our stops?

No, cause barrier of entrance is quite low. Also the some have different objectives. Central banks don't care about profits, just about stability of their currency. Some firms wanna hedge on the markets against currency risk. Lots of different motives why people use currency markets. It's not only used for making profits.

So, can we use the sentiment data provided by the big retail brokers, for a filter of our positions?

If their positions were purely random, then half of them had to be winning, half loosing of every trade, according to the theory of big numbers. The positions are in fact taken by some technical or fundamental reasons, that's why i think the theory of big numbers do not work here at all, there is no randomness here, there is using of method's that provide some data. It is another think of interpreting this data.

So if 95% of the retail users are dead wrong, can't we play the opposite positions? The bad thing is that you don't know what time frame do the loosing retailers look at. Here in our benefit comes the technical analysis. Just use some very heavy support/resistance zone and i think we can make some $. It may be even useful for the short term traders, that use 15 min chart as a main. They can enter only in the opposite way of the retailers and they already know what's going on the big scale.

My last observations(for about 2 months now) are that this works quite well, by opening positions in line with the main trend, that must be opposite to the market sentiment. I enter on breaking the last high/low, with a stop at the last low/high... For targets i use previous obvious support resistance zone. The TM that i'm looking at are 4H,Daily/Weakly. 1h chart may also be used for some time fine tuning. Flags, Head and shoulders, and double bottom/top, also seems to be working fine, if they are in the confirmation of the main(daily/weekly) trend and are in the opposite way of the market sentiment indicators.

I found that here i had typed 1.35, i was meaning 1.45...

And as it follows, the price did breached 1.45 with some 20 pips, for taking out some stops, and now is runing lower, falling bellow key diagonal support at 4h. I wont sell the fall however, as it is expected by nearly 65% of the retailers. In stead i will wait for the price to fall to about 1.4200/30 and will see what's forming and what is the market sentiment showing, if it(the retail sentiment) becomes more bearish and there is a good technical reason i will buy at about 1.4200/30 with stop under that level. I expect that it will become clear what's happing at least on Monday or Tuesday next weak. So for now EURUSD is off the game and may look for some EUR croses that sentiment is bullish to go for some short, for a day or too.

Does anybody knows how is a stop hunt operation conducted? I imagine if I am a market maker, the trend is up, a support forms. when an opportunity comes, I will sell all the way to take all the stops at the support. But if during my selling, my sell keeps getting absorbed by even larger buy orders, wouldn't I risk burning myself too?

Personally I don't see such operations as stop hunt, it's just part of the nature of the market before price continues. If the demand is there, there's no way price is ever going to the stops for whoever wants to hunt it. Only if there is uncertainty, price will go back to test its validity because no buyers dare to attack, or so called stop hunt.

The prognosis for bridging 1.45 by a 10-15 pips proves to be right
The market sentiment is indeed a useful tool for me for sure

The stop hunting may be real, the guys from forexlive were explaining what is the stop hunting, but it is made rather in the time when there is no volume, so the market to move violently over their orders. sort of time is just before news, the 5 minutes before and the late hours after the U.S. market closes until the Japanese open.

For the intraday trades i think it is not in a such interest, because of the small stops in the intraday levels, but for HTF it may be real. just like that 1.45 been overcome by 16 pips.

The option barriers are becoming bigger and bigger, as the market of options grows, so these levels are also attractive to be taken by the option seller....