The whole concept of buy or sell is difficult on the pinks......How many times have you bought at the bid and sold at the ask on the pinks?
The RED and GREEN simply indicate whether the price of the trade was higher lower or the same as previous trades. That's all it indicates.
There really is no way to know if a trade was a buy or a sell.
Many here will tell you a trade is both a buy and a sell. That may not really be the case. A MM can buy sahres from you and put them in his inventory for a short period of time. In my world that was a sell. It went from the market to the MM. Later the MM will sell those shares to buyer in the market. I call the a buy. You can argue that each trade was a buy and a sell.
What about the frequent case where the MM just matches orders so that someone sells and someone buys those same shares at the same time without the MM taking posession. Which is that, A buy, a sell. both?
What you can say about a trade is the the printed price is higher, lower or the same as the previous trade or series of trades. To my way of looking at it, calling a trade a buy or a sell without knowning which way the shares actually moved in someones account is pure speculation.
That is one reason I post many of my transactions, the price and whether it was at the bid, the ask, or in between. That provides real information to the board about what the MM's are actually doing. Information that is not available any other way.
Hope this is helpful.
Steady_T
