I've been trading for 7 years. I've been through probably 20 different direct access firms. I cannot find one, (with the exception of IB, which I find difficult to trade with) that does a good job routing orders intelligently. You place a smart buy order at 20.00, where BRUT is sitting on the ask, and it ignores BRUT and locks the market with INET or ARCA. Even using ARCA, which supposedly uses smart order routing, does the same thing half the time. And yes, I know you can route directly to a specific ecn. Isn't there ONE brokerage that actually routes your order at the price you request, without locking the market with a competing ECN?
Yes. It was a couple of years ago, but I have a notation that their smart order execution didn't work very well. Maybe they're better now?
I have never had a problem with their Smart Router, and I use limit orders almost exclusively. Price improvement occurs so frequently, I no longer bother counting the frequency of their occurrence. Good Trading to you. - Spydertrader
I don't know about the general case, but a lot of SMART routers ignore BRUT some/all of the time because it has routine problems with stale quotes and they also display (short-sale) offers that cannot be taken when the market is crossed or for uptick-rule reasons. It seems that some people do have decent smart-routing, based on watching T&S when they sweep multiple people at the inside.