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Comment by TrappinDatRust | Hacker News Reader

but... blind bidding is how everything works. If I was a CapEx manager at Y company, why would i reveal pricing of other bidders? It's a conflict of interest for the other bidders. Even if you were to keep the pricing entity private it's the opposite of efficient because creates this 'bit-wise' incremental bidding that destroys the price. Unless you did some kind of random candle auction, this is easily gamed for a such a high value asset like real-estate.

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Are public stocks and bonds bought and sold with blind bidding?

In parts yes and in parts no.

There’s indeed an order book that’s “public enough”, but not every trading system enters every intent into the public order book. (Even as a retail nobody, I can create contingent orders that only become public orders once the trigger conditions are met.) I also don’t believe that individual bid/asks can be traced to a specific bidder.

Further, block trades are negotiated off-order-book and later reported.

I'd like to know more about all of this. Do you have any links?

> Even as a retail nobody, I can create contingent orders that only become public orders once the trigger conditions are met.

Do different brokers implement this differently, or is this an a property of the exchanges themselves?

The contingent or smart orders are implemented by brokers (E*Trade’s are different from Interactive Brokers) or in trading platforms. They are held outside the exchange until whatever trigger condition allows them to be expressed as an order directly supported (which introduces timing and other risks that they won’t work like a natively exchange-supported order).

In terms of links, I don’t have a ready primer to vouch for. I worked 6 years in online broker tech, but it was decades ago.

Stocks and bonds are traded something on the order of 1 million times more frequently than a given house, making price discovery much more transparent even without an open bidding process.

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