Except for that whole front running problem. You may not care about price improvement but front running should really, really concern you.
How can you tell the difference between your broker's route doing something that affects your execution as you suggest and a Market Maker not tied to your routing reacting to flow they see in real-time after it hits the order book?
Thanks for cutting to the chase. Point being, market makers are paying billions of dollars per year for order flow - and they pay that out not as a professional courtesy but because they can make retail discount customers pay up in slippage. PFOF has essentially replaced commissions and customers are going to pay one way or the other. This isn't free GMail.
What nonsense is this. No one ever pays such spreads. Set the limit at mid price and you’ll have zero spread, regardless of the broker. You may not get filled immediately but so what.
From the client side I don’t think it’s possible. If you were the SEC and could see the complete order flow it would be fairly trivial, I would imagine, to find tailgating by just watching flow. As a client you probably only have the option of trusting regulatory bodies to do their jobs.
Apparently when you take in several hundred million in PFOF fees over a six month period it's barely an inconvenience. FINRA fined Robinhood in December 2019 for “best execution violations related to its customers’ equity orders and related supervisory failures”. Robinhood paid the $1.25 million fine without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
I’m sure the market maker has an ID that shows depending on ones access level. If you don’t have depth of market, the only time you would see the market maker would be when they are on the inside market, right? Or would you see even that? Maybe the quotes on that particular platform just show bid/offer? Without ECN or market maker information? Personally, I trade off the ladder and usually try to make the spread using IB smartroute. Not the most efficient in some cases, but for now it is ok. While I don’t have level II access, no compliants so far as I trade very liquid stocks.
what does prime brokerage growing 8percent per year have to do with discount brokers selling order flow (as per your earlier post in this thread)
The point being, that CALPERS and Black Rock and Citadel and the Stanford Endowment Fund aren’t using E*Trade or Bob’s Zero Commissions Trading App for a reason.