Can You See Hedge Funds on the DOM?

Can a retail trader identify a hedge fund's orders through the DOM?

Not reliably just by looking at a large order.

A large displayed order could come from different types of market participants. It might be genuine resting liquidity, part of an execution strategy, or an order that disappears before being executed.

Institutional traders can also split orders across time, price levels, and execution venues.

That means the public order book provides useful information about displayed liquidity, but it doesn't give you a complete picture of institutional positioning.

Instead of trying to guess who placed every order, I focus on observable behavior: where liquidity appears, whether it remains, what gets executed, and how price responds.