Wall Street Spies on Your Trades Legally – Now You Can Spy on Theirs

By Keith Kaplan

Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).

 

Wall Street is watching you.

Not in a creepy surveillance-camera kind of way. It’s a type of financial surveillance that – without your knowledge – tilts the playing field in Wall Street’s favor every time you buy or sell a stock.

It happens every time you place a trade on Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, or any other brokerage app.

High-frequency trading firms pay your broker for the right to see your order before anyone else does. It’s called “payment for order flow.” Then they use algorithms to react to your trade in a fraction of a second – often getting ahead of it and taking the other side.

This strategy has become one of the most reliable profit machines on Wall Street.

Citadel Securities, the market-making arm of billionaire Ken Griffin’s trading empire, pulled in a record $12.2 billion in trading revenue last year – up 25% from the record it had set just the year before. The firm now handles more than one out of every three retail stock trades placed in America.

Over that time, Virtu Financial, a smaller but similar player, made $3.6 billion. It handles about a quarter of all retail market orders in the country.

Then there’s Jane Street. Last year, it made $39.6 billion. That’s more than JPMorgan Chase, one of the largest banks in the world. And Jane Street did it with a staff of just 3,500 people, compared with JPMorgan’s 316,000.

This isn’t pleasant to hear, but for decades, you’ve been the product, and Wall Street has been the predator. It’s no wonder these firms walk away with billions of dollars in profits, leaving you with the scraps.

But what if you could turn the tables? What if, instead of being spied on, you could spy on them – legally?

That’s exactly what my team and I built. It’s a way to see Wall Street’s most sophisticated money moving, days before the news that explains it ever breaks.

And you don’t need to spend millions of dollars buying order flow to do it. You just need to know where to look.

Introducing the Smart Money Edge

When Wall Street traders know something the rest of us don’t, they don’t just sit on it. They position themselves to profit, often placing large bets in the options market.

For a lot of regular investors, the options market sounds complicated, even a little dangerous. So they tune it out entirely. That’s an understandable instinct. It’s also a costly one.

The options market isn’t some side room. In 2025, more than 15 billion options contracts changed hands in the U.S. – a sixth straight annual record, averaging 61 million contracts a day.

That’s 61 million clues every day about where the smart money thinks a stock is headed next.

You’re not going to find patterns in that data by staring at a screen. But we’ve built a way to track that activity using software.

We call it the Smart Money Edge. And in our testing, it’s flagged real moves before they happened:

  • Rocket Lab (RKLB) – flagged the day before it beat earnings and jumped 50% in a single day
  • Vista Energy (VIST) – flagged nine days before a surprise acquisition sent shares up 32%, even though the stock had been crashing right up until the news broke
  • Oscar Health (OSCR) – flagged about a week before strong earnings sent shares up 15%
  • GameStop (GME) – flagged before a single social media post sent shares up 70%

That’s what our system does. It tracks how much is being traded in a stock’s options, how it’s being traded, and how that compares to normal – across thousands of stocks, every day.

We then use AI to check whether what’s happening is genuinely unusual for that stock, or just noise.

I’m not going to walk through exactly how it works here. But once you see what it’s flagged – and how far in advance – you’ll understand why we think this is one of the most interesting patterns in the market today.

Don’t Play This Outdated Game

Here’s the part that matters even if you never look into any of this further.

The market you’re investing in today isn’t the same one you learned to invest in. Deep-pocketed firms like Citadel Securities, Virtu, and Jane Street already see your order the moment you place it, and they’re built to profit from it before your trade even finishes executing.

If your edge is gut feel, cable news, or a “guru” on social media, you’re not just at a disadvantage. You’re playing an older version of the game, against opponents who upgraded years ago.

If you want to see this pattern in action, I’ll be going through it all during my 30-Day Wealth Accelerator event. It kicks off on Tuesday, Aug. 25 at 10 a.m. ET.

I’ll show you how we track this activity, the current list of stocks it’s flagged, and how it’s performed in our testing.

I’ll also be taking questions live on Sept. 4. So, if you’re skeptical, you can ask me directly. It’s free, and there’s no obligation to do anything with the insights I’ll be sharing. Just make sure to RSVP here.

You’ll get immediate access to the top stock our system is flagging right now. You’ll also have the chance to access a trial version of our software so you can see for yourself how it works.

All the best,

Keith Kaplan
CEO, TradeSmith

P.S. European regulators are banning payment for order flow entirely, starting in mid-2026 – they’ve decided it’s not a fair deal for investors. In the U.S., it’s still completely legal. Until that changes, this is the closest thing you’ve got to turning the tables on Wall Street’s spies. Here’s that link again to RSVP.