Large trades in a financial market are usually split into smaller parts and
traded incrementally over extended periods of time. We address these large
trades as hidden orders. In order to identify and characterize hidden orders we
fit hidden Markov models to the time series of the sign of the tick by tick
inventory variation of market members of the Spanish Stock Exchange. Our
methodology probabilistically detects trading sequences, which are
characterized by a net majority of buy or sell transactions. We interpret these
patches of sequential buying or selling transactions as proxies of the traded
hidden orders. We find that the time, volume and number of transactions size
distributions of these patches are fat tailed. Long patches are characterized
by a high fraction of market orders and a low participation rate, while short
patches have a large fraction of limit orders and a high participation rate. We
observe the existence of a buy-sell asymmetry in the number, average length,
average fraction of market orders and average participation rate of the
detected patches. The detected asymmetry is clearly depending on the local
market trend. We also compare the hidden Markov models patches with those
obtained with the segmentation method used in Vaglica {\it et al.} (2008) and
we conclude that the former ones can be interpreted as a partition of the
latter ones.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figure
