Mar. 19, 2023
I fully support this new rule that would remove the Marker Makers from being first in line to receive orders and thus bypassing every concept of a fair and free market. Giving everyone else the same opportunity to go through a public auction is how it should have always been anyway. I think it's getting clearer that Market Makers have become "Market Rulers" over the last few years. Payment for order flow and using alternate trading systems used by Market Makers(Citadel in particular) are not only giant conflicts of interest but are also blatantly antithesis to an "equal opportunity" type of market. There's very reliable evidence that investors circumventing these practices through alternate brokers that won't deal with these practices, consistently get better price and execution than investors using brokers like Robindhood that will feed all their order flow to Market Makers and therefor proving that FINRA's best execution guidance is being violated every day the market is open. The commission should also look into wholesalers taking advantage of unsuccessful auctions to coerce brokers into routing the order wherever they want, again stomping on everything that is fair and free in this market. These entities are nothing more than middlemen, leeching minuscule amounts of money on every single trade that goes through them, under the guise of better performance and execution, when in fact it has been proven time and time again to be the exact opposite. They have a monopoly on every single thing that is going on in the market and therefor are able to influence it as much as they want without any fear of repercussions. Speaking of which, these guys break the rules more often than they respect them. Why? Because fines are only good at teaching a lesson to the poor. For them, it's just the cost of doing business. It seems pretty obvious to me that they should first of all lose their licenses if caught in any wrong doings and possibly face jail time as well. Right now, the punishment is more of an annoyance for them than anything else. This market is in dire needs of more transparency and less monopoly. These middlemen are only there to muddy the waters so that nobody(even you) can see what's going on at the bottom of the pool. Time to clean that pool up. Chris Pelletier