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Ordinarily, however, a big player would NOT trade in this fashion, and would strongly prefer to "scale in" and "scale out" the orders, i.e. do a chunk at a time, X number of times so as not to move the market a lot.

I believe I've read in the last couple of years, that the big players were working on algorithms to "stealthily" sell of large lots (in such a way that the very high frequency trading system algorithms were not triggered). Secondly, I have read of talk of "dark pools" at least for stocks -- do you know if there are such for commodities?

Thanks again for your insight.

Full Disclosure: Long silver, mainly 'cuz I think fiat currencies are going to inflate over the next couple of years. If it looks like Sarah and / or Bachmann will win the White House in 2012, along with the GOP taking the Senate, I may go long on US stocks, particularly defense contractors.

Cheers!

We have a little confusion here. HFTs are not part of this discussion; they are relevant to stocks ONLY, never to physical commodity futures. Maybe in SP500 index futures, maybe, but the HFT algos would have some difficulty working in that mkt. Also, SP futures don't have the position limits problem, afair.

Same for "dark pools"; they wouldn't be useful in futures mkts as long as every trade must be settled by the end of the trading day. There can be no possibility of staying "dark" in a regime of daily settlement.