FINRA Dark Pool Data
More than a third of US share volume prints away from the exchanges. We rebuild that picture every week from FINRA’s own ATS and OTC files and match it against CBOE tape volume — off-exchange share, inferred side and short interest for thousands of US tickers. Free to read; the exact share and the session it belongs to are in the tiles below, and a week FINRA never reported shows “—”, never a zero.
Market Overview
Latest Day (--)
🎥 Video: Inside the Dark Pools
Where institutions move billions — how dark pools actually work, how prints reach the FINRA TRF, and what they can and cannot tell you as a trader.
What are Dark Pools?
Dark pools are private exchanges where institutional investors can trade large blocks of shares without revealing their orders to the public market. This helps minimize market impact but reduces transparency. FINRA requires ATS (Alternative Trading Systems) to report their trading data.
How to Trade Dark Pools
Dark pool data never reveals whether a trade was a buy or a sell. However, the market context provides important clues: When large dark pool trades occur at prominent market tops, they are likely to be profit-taking or sells by institutional investors. Conversely, significant dark pool activity at market bottoms often indicates accumulation or buying. Watch for unusual volume spikes in conjunction with key support and resistance levels.
Suspicious Darkpool Volumes
Highest darkpool-ratio trades in major ETFs (sector, thematic, inverse) and S&P 500 stocks. Click a row to view the chart.
| Date | Ticker | Description | DP Volume | Rank | DP Ratio |
|---|
Dark Pool Trade Chart
Click on any ticker in the tables to view its price chart. Use Arrow keys to navigate.
Dark Pool Volume - Search all Tickers
Off-exchange volume estimates for the period after FINRA ATS data is no longer available. Calculated as: Total Market Volume - Estimated Exchange Volume (using CBOE market share ratio).
Most Active Today (CBOE)
Check on CBOEEstimated Dark Pool by Sector
Recent: --Short Volume by Sector
Last 7 days: --Sector Momentum Score (SDMS)
--The chart below shows 4 panes for the selected sector ETF: Price (OHLC with regime-colored candles), SDMS (0–100 composite — above 50 = net institutional inflows, below 50 = outflows), Net Volume (long vs short darkpool volume with the NV Strength momentum line), and Short Ratio (raw short % and its smoothed Strength indicator — rising = increasing short pressure). Together, these reveal whether institutions are quietly accumulating or distributing within each sector.
Sector Darkpool History
Sector Comparison
Historical Darkpool Data
Who Executes the Flow — Market Makers in Dollars
The weekly ATS feed used above counts shares, which cannot tell a million shares of a penny stock from a million shares of Apple. FINRA's monthly off-exchange summary carries the dollar notional as well, per reporting firm — so the same question can be asked in money: who actually handles the order flow, and how large is their average ticket.
Market Share Over Time
Execution League Table
| # | Firm | Notional | Share | Shares (bn) | Trades | Ø Ticket |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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The average ticket is the single clearest tell of the business model: a retail wholesaler internalises many small orders, an institutional desk crosses few large ones. Note this feed reports off-exchange execution — it is not the whole market, and a firm's absence from it says nothing about its exchange activity.
Block Trading by Venue
Dark pools exist so that large orders can trade without moving the price, so the share of volume that actually prints in blocks is the measure of whether a venue is doing that job or simply slicing retail-sized flow.
| ATS Venue | Shares (bn) | Market Share | Block Share | Ø Block Size | Ø Trade Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Reg SHO Threshold Securities
Securities with persistent failures to deliver — five consecutive settlement days of fails above the threshold. Being listed forces close-outs and is the clearest public marker of a settlement problem in a name.
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| Symbol | Name | Market |
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Short Squeeze Risk
Heavily shorted stocks carry short squeeze potential. When prices rise unexpectedly, short sellers are forced to buy shares to cover their positions (stop-loss), creating additional buying pressure. This can lead to explosive upward moves as more shorts rush to exit.
Downside risk: If the price of a heavily shorted stock starts to move lower, a new downtrend can form or even wide gaps lower become likely. Often, there is a good reason why stocks are heavily shorted — poor fundamentals, deteriorating earnings, or sector weakness. Don't assume every shorted stock is a squeeze candidate.
Key indicators: High short interest (>20%), low days to cover (<3), rising price with high volume. Watch for stocks with high short ratios during bullish market phases.
Short Sale Circuit Breakers
Securities that triggered the SEC Rule 201 short sale price test restriction (uptick rule).
Last Update: --
Circuit Breaker Short vs Long ETF Balance
Short/Inverse ETFs minus Long/Leveraged ETFs triggering circuit breakers. Green = rising (improving), Red = falling (deteriorating).
FINRA — Confirmed Trades Section
Verified ATS data published with ~4 week delay by FINRA
Confirmed Largest Dark Pool Trades (Delayed)
FINRA ATS confirmed weekly dark pool trades data (published with ~4 week delay).
Top Short Volume (FINRA)
Last 7 days: --Dark Pool by Sector (FINRA)
Confirmed weekly data - --Understanding Dark Pool Data
FINRA ATS Data
- Weekly Volume: Total shares traded on Alternative Trading Systems (dark pools)
- Trade Count: Number of individual trades executed
- Tier Classification: NMS Tier 1 (large caps) vs Tier 2 (small caps)
- Delay: Data is published with ~4 week lag
Short Interest Metrics
- Short Volume Ratio: Shares sold short as a percentage of off-exchange volume — both figures come from FINRA's daily file, which covers only trades reported to its facilities. It is not a share of all trading: measured across 12,214 symbols the median is 48%, against 12–20% of consolidated volume for large caps. A high reading is normal rather than bearish, because market makers internalising retail flow book the offsetting side as short.
- Short Interest: Total shares currently held short (bi-monthly)
- Days to Cover: Short interest / average daily volume, as published by FINRA. Blank where FINRA caps the figure — a stock with no meaningful volume has no cover time, not an infinite one.
- ATS % (Ownership Mix): Of a ticker's off-exchange volume, the share crossed inside an ATS — a dark pool, predominantly institutional. The remainder is internalised by wholesalers, predominantly retail order flow sold under PFOF. The mapping is dominant, not exact: wholesalers also print institutional principal trades. Colour reflects the ticker's own history — green near its high for ATS participation, red near its low — because a name permanently at 5% is a leveraged ETF, not a retail surge. Weekly, 21–35 days behind; the last complete week is used. Market-wide this share has been stable at 22–29% since 2021, so the information is in the cross-section, not the trend.
- Squeeze Risk: How crowded a ticker's short side is versus the rest of the scorable universe (0–100), from days to cover, short interest as a share of shares outstanding, and the change since the last settlement. It describes positioning, not what happens next — it is not fitted to future returns and is not a probability. Tickers below a minimum average daily volume are left blank rather than scored.
- Circuit Breaker: Triggered when stock falls 10%+ from prior close
Data Sources
CBOE (Cboe Global Markets):
FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority):
Update Frequency:
- Most Active: Real-time (click Update)
- Short Volume: Daily (end of day)
- ATS/Dark Pool Volume: Weekly (~4 week lag)
- Short Interest: Bi-monthly
Coverage: All NMS securities traded on US exchanges
Note: Dark pool data from FINRA has a regulatory reporting delay of approximately 4 weeks.
What this page shows — and how each number is obtained
"Dark pool volume" is not one measurement. Three sources answer slightly different questions and arrive at different times, so the same ticker and the same day can legitimately carry more than one figure. Every number on this page belongs to exactly one of the rows below.
| Category | What is actually counted | How it is obtained | Available | Shown as |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FINRA ATS confirmed |
Shares executed inside Alternative Trading Systems — the venues actually called dark pools. About 14% of US equity volume market-wide. | Reported by member firms to FINRA. A measurement, not a model. | Weekly, 21–35 days late (two publication waves) | Bubble with a white outline |
| Off-exchange reported |
All off-exchange volume — dark pools plus retail wholesalers and internalisers, so structurally wider than the ATS figure. Measured per ticker: median 25% of that ticker's volume, middle half 13–37%. | Reported to FINRA: the volume its trade reporting facilities recorded for the symbol that day (~12,200 symbols). Where a symbol is absent, it falls back to total volume minus exchange volume extrapolated from CBOE's four books. | Daily, available the same night | Bubble without an outline |
| Projected | Same quantity as the row above, for the newest session CBOE has not published yet. | Today's total volume × this ticker's own average off-exchange share over its last 10 measured days. Typical error ~11 percentage points. | Same day | Marked est in the tables |
Why a ticker can show several different volumes. They are not in conflict: an ATS figure and an off-exchange figure count different venues, and a weekly total, a multi-day sum and a single session cover different periods. Each table states its own period in its header. Projected values are replaced automatically as soon as CBOE publishes — volumes, ratios and ranks are recomputed from scratch on every run rather than carried forward, so a correction propagates everywhere. Rankings always refer to the last complete week; the week in progress is excluded, because a partial week would rank near-last for almost every ticker and say nothing.
Data Sources
ATS Data: FINRA ATS Transparency (weekly) | Short Volume: CBOE