I've been wading through terabytes of financial data over the past month

There might be other ways to know about the data in advance? Some kind of flaw somewhere that lets us sniff the “dark rooms”?

If that's the case, couldn't the providers who operate the dark rooms (like OpenChronos) use their own realtime data to do so? Are there any who do that today? (i.e. monetized market surveillance). If so, does it run afoul of regulations?

That's one of the purposes of darkpools, to let institutions trade large size without moving the market. No one's getting manipulated here: both the buyers and sellers know what's going on. You can trade on these yourself - the darkpool operators are always looking for new market makers. All you need to do is agree to quote a few hundred US equities in decent size inside the NBBO, six and a half hours a day, and you too can have access to this flow.

> Unfortunately the SEC only requires them to report transactions within 15 minutes, not in real time. TRF reports must happen within 10 seconds or be submitted with a late modifier [0]. An executing broker systematically submitting all reports 15 minutes late would be investigated pretty quickly. You can buy access to the consolidated tape from a marketdata provider, although this is going to be pretty prohibitively expensive for an individual. [0] https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/rulebooks/finra-rules/6...

why do you think you will be able to generate "consistent income" with a trading bot in a field that is highly scrutinized by some of the best talents in the world with access to better & faster data and backed by a mountain of capital?