Here is a funny article about the Dark Pool I came across:

“The biggest reason people are afraid of “Dark Pools” is the name, like a kid being stuck in a closet by a mean sibling, the image is frightening. Maybe they should be called “Block Trading Venue for Institutional Traders Who Know What They are Doing”. BTVITWKWTD -Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue does it?” http://www.cnbc.com/id/100424690

In fact, the dark pool has been around for a while, how long? I do not know. But I do know that it used to be called “upstairs room” trading.

I personally have watched dark pool action for about four months now. Sometimes I can see the prints come in within minutes of their execution and other times not until a day later. As I understand it, the rule is that the institutional traders must report their dark pool trades for public view within four hours of execution. I think the way some of the institutional traders get away with really late reporting on their trades is they do the trade in their London or Asia desks, i.e. a different time zone, which gives them more time delay to report in the U.S. If someone has a better explanation, please enlighten me!

Watching institutional traders trade has been a really interesting learning experience. I think that when the institutional traders start buying GLD, SLV, GDX, IAU, NUGT, JNUG, GDXJ by the millions of shares per etf is when it will be time to buy. I have not seen that yet. I did see an isolated 5-6 million share block trade on IAU a few weeks back, which was short covering. I also saw some buying before the fed announcement, but that was only in the hundreds of thousands and very short-lived. I think they exited the morning after in smaller share amounts.