Mar. 12, 2023
I wholeheartedly support this rule for the sake of all household investors. With one exception: The rule allows for orders to go to Citadel FIRST and then to the auction for fair competition. This still gives them a major information advantage which should be removed! It should be-- brokers first routing to the auction and only then, if someone doesn't take your order, routing to firms like Citadel. If there's one thing Wall Street hates.. It's a fair fight. Firms like Citadel Securities have a near-monopoly on order flow: Broker-dealers route more than 90% of marketable orders of individual investors in NMS stocks to a small group of six off-exchange dealers, often referred to as “wholesalers ... The wholesaling business is highly concentrated, with two firms capturing approximately 66% of the executed share volume of wholesalers as of the first quarter of 2022." And this is just the overall market. Within certain stocks, that monopoly might reach over 70%... or 80%. Or higher. A single wholesaler could control almost all the order flow for a particular stock on a given day. Could you imagine? They hate fair competition because it means they could lose. They want riskless profit. And right now that's exactly what they get, day in and day out. An auction takes a sledgehammer to their cushy current position. Their current monopoly isn't fair and that's obvious to anyone who looks. Please for the love of sanity and rationale, pass and enforce this rule, no more slap-on-the-wrist fines. Uphold your mandate and protect household investors from these predators that are stealing from the poor and at the same time destroying our markets/economy! Thank you.