[codeismightier]

I'm not a fan of payment for order flow. The problem is that it lets HFTs pick off the uninformed orders, leaving the orders that actually reach the exchange more "toxic". This lowers the incentive for others to rest orders on the Central Limit Order Book, harming price discovery. So while in the short term no one is harmed, the long-run consequences could be bad.

With that said, yeah, the NYT piece is terrible.

[crzwdjk]

If the HFTs pick off uninformed orders, wouldn't that mean that the remaining orders are more informed? That does seem like it would make trading on the exchange itself would get more expensive, though, because this is all basically a mechanism for the HFTs to price-discriminate. But the market did somehow work back in the bad old days of odd-eights and such.