Trading and Exchanges Chapter 15: How Big Trades Get Done Without Crashing Prices
Say you manage a pension fund and you need to sell 500,000 shares of some stock. You cannot just drop a market order on the exchange. The order book does not have that much liquidity sitting around. If you try to force it through, you will eat through every level of the book and crash the price on yourself. Chapter 15 is about how these giant trades actually get done.