Big cheeses on Wall Street have all the advantages when it comes to trading stocks -- no surprise there.

Ever wonder why a stock drops even when the company's quarterly earnings beat analysts' expectations. Well, cunning investment rogues are often tipped off well in advance of the earnings release -- hence the oft-used aphorism: Buy on the rumor; sell on the news.

Similarly, by the time most companies release a negative press release, it's old news for the big boys. Company executives, bankers, brokers and hedge funds have already sold their positions. And so it goes.

I shared my market cynicism with Stefanie Kammerman, a savvy New York stock trader who was in Dallas recently attending an investment conference. I asked Kammerman if the stock market is manipulated. Her response was quick and resolute: "Of course it is, completely. There is insider trading; there are people going to jail; come on, there is a lot stuff going on. You have to get past that, but most people can't."

Kammerman, managing director of The Stock Whisperer Trading Company, runs an online trading room called The Java Pit. Anyone interested in trading stocks should check it out, but that's not why I reached out to her.

She is an expert in so-called dark pools, an increasingly important segment of the stock market. Dark pools are lightly-regulated private trading venues set up typically by large investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Barclays and Credit Suisse.

Large investors daily buy and sell millions of shares of stocks and exchange traded funds anonymously in these dark pools. They have been around for years, and yet few small investors know of their existence, but they should.

Consider this: The dominance of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq as the central hub of stock trading is over, according to a report by Yesha Yadav, a Vanderbilt Law School professor.

The NYSE handles about 20 percent of the stock trading volume and the Nasdaq about 15 percent or about 35 percent of the total. But dark pools -- and there are an estimated 37 of them -- now comprise almost 40 percent of total volume.

The basic purpose of dark pools is to allow hedge funds and institutional investors to match buy and sell orders without displaying the quote to the public as is the case on major stock exchanges. If a hedge fund placed an order on the NYSE to sell one million shares or more of Intel Corp., the price would collapse before the order could be executed.

Placing orders with Goldman Sachs' Sigma X dark pool, for example, solves that problem. The trade is hidden or so I thought. I was aware of dark pools, but paid little attention to them because, as the name implies, I assumed this trading activity was not available to the public.

That assumption is not entirely correct. Regulators have been pressured in recent years to shed some light on dark pool trading, and as a result with just a little effort anyone can get a glimpse into this world. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which regulates the securities industry, now provides dark pool data on its website, although there is a seven-day lag.

But it gets even better for us average folks. Charles Schwab now provides a window into dark pools trades. Space constraints won't allow me to explain the process in detail, but it starts simply by opening a Charles Schwab trading account, which doesn't even require any money.

A Schwab representative showed me how to access the so-called block trade indicator, where dark pool trades can be monitored.

"Today, everybody has access to the dark pool data feed," Kammerman said. "Most every buy and every sell is recorded."

Now here's where it gets really interesting. Kammerman teaches small investors how to trade by watching this dark pool data feed. She has made several prescient market calls over the past two years simply by watching large dark pool trades.

For example, on Sept. 6 during her daily "Whisper of the Day" online market briefing, she alerted investors to a massive 2.6 million share trade in Wells Fargo & Co. Somebody obviously knew about the coming scandal at Wells and was furiously unloading stock.

Two days later, news broke that bank employees had opened accounts without customers' authorization. Regulators announced large fines, and by Sept. 16, Wells Fargo shares were down 9 percent. The big boys had already dumped their shares, but at least in this case Kammerman and her clients saw this coming.

I asked her if she is worried that dark pool operators will notice her trades and change their strategy.

"My little trades aren't affecting someone who sells millions of shares," she said. "The dark pools are still going to get their trades done before me. They don't care about me."

Indeed, they don't, but at least now we can watch them.