Quote Stuffing

That thing pretentious dorks do when they can summon a Shakespeare stanza or a Walt Whitman poem for any occasion. “It looks like your brakes are shot and you could use a new muffler.” “Ah yes, when troubles come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” Yeesh...classic quote stuffing.

The term also has a meaning in finance. It refers to a trick traders can use to manipulate market prices.

You're a very active trader. Hundreds of trades a day. Much of your trading takes place on algorithmic platforms...computers executing orders at high speeds based on pre-set triggers. In order to create situations where the computers can squeeze small gains out of blips in the market, you decide you should manufacture some of those blips yourself. So...you turn to a little quote stuffing.

In this technique, you place a lot of orders for a stock...then you quickly withdraw them. You aren't making trades, just throwing a ton of quotes into the bid/ask system. It's like entering an art auction with no intention to buy...you're just raising your paddle to mess with the price.

The goal is to create those short-term blips. Your quotes mess with the very short-term pricing, but have no real long-term effect. However, your computer algorithm can jump in at high speeds to take advantage of the corrections that happen as the market recovers from your shenanigans.