Mar. 31, 2023
Dear Civil Servant, As an individual retail investor, I am grateful for these efforts to create more competition and transparency in the market, I am glad to comment on these proposals. I see these are large recommended enhancements to market structure and hope you keep the spirit of these change to be effective and true. Everyone regardless of status or size should have access to the best priced quotations available in the market system that sustains them, the best market is the one with the best price discovery to adequately price in supply and demand, such prices generally should be determined by healthy competitive market forces. It cannot be justified that it be possible to pay for the ability to control orders to then arrange them favorably in their favor. It is like scalping, by paying billions of dollars they then turn around and stand to profit off the back of the product, the retail orders, me and everyone I know just by not going to the lit market of accurate price discovery. Opposition from Citadel on this proposal is because they stand to lose this scalping technique, don't get me started on this same behavior with Authorized Participants of ETF shenanigans. If I am losing money the more I trade, the incentive to no commission trading makes PFOF lucrative having more information of future price discovery since settlement isn't instant, and when trading is done in milliseconds like these " sophisticated traders" do, it is a lot of time to profit before updating price discovery. Citadel cannot be trusted, they abused that trust consistently with record high spree of crimes and fines, has been front-running customer orders since 2006 and REALLY shouldn’t have access to a majority (50%+!) on retail order flow. If these sophisticated trading costs so much to maintain to start justifying large fees for handling their trades then I think it's time to invest in making markets more accessible equally rather than the billions that is paid for competitive edge in trading speed between Wallstreet players, ridiculous. IEX is a great exchange to set profitable standards for retail. Economic Analysis done by the commission says to look forward to retail saving from $1.12 billion to $2.35 billion on transaction costs, another great step. Through increased open competition to supply liquidity to marketable orders of individual investors, hopefully these savings will translate to lower transaction costs for individual investors, potentially enhance order execution quality for institutional investors, and improve price discovery. Thank you, Individual investor