Hey Risk,
I had deleted the post because I didn’t want to be misconstrued as pointing out a mistake. Thanks for taking this in the right spirit.
So here is the key difference between front running and what happened here:
Front Running is when you have info about an order and you act on it before it hits the market. Your outbidding happened AFTER placed the bid.
For example, this is what they do inside a bank
Look at this hypothetical situation
Let us say I am a client trader in a large bank, and Nestle, my client is selling 1.2 Billion USDCHF. Now the prop trader in my team is my friend, ( or I am the prop guy) and I will tell him that “dude CHF is going to move, why dont you trade?” ,
He hits the order before Nestle. Now I do Nestle’s order and create a small move say 5-10 pips (donno the number these days have been ages since I hit cross currency), then he covers his order.
In your order’s case, there was no front running. They did not know that your order was coming. They saw it after it arrived, and then put a better bid than yours in a matter of milliseconds.
What happened there (most likely) was there were one algo there which said best bid till 72.05 and another one which said best bid till (X) where X> 72.05.
So when he put that 70, the two algos went on a flame war, and one settled at 72.05, and the other bettered it at 72.10, one tick higher. So you put 70, the first guy did 70.05, second guy did 70.10, first went 70.15 and so on and one of them stopped at 72.05 at its limit and the other other at 72.10. Also since this is an option, it is highly likely (99%) that the bidding happened on an IV and not on the price. They were earlier peacing out around 67, may be your order triggered the change in them, I don’t know what happened there.
TL;DR - the difference between front running and this is the fact that in front running you had info about the order pre-facto, and worse, it may have been given to you by someone who is a client of yours to whom you have a what is called “fiduciary responsibility”
Mid-tier - IIFL, Edel, MO, Alphagrep, many
Algo Source - There is no need for feed, this is market tick by tick data. You just need a colocated server in NSE for low-latency.