[outworlder]

> as their primary investing platform

:%s/investing/speculation/g

Very few people use RH as 'investing'. Those will be on boring brokers like Vanguard.

I have a Tastyworks account too - the fills are way better than Robinhood's. As expected, since they charge some amount per trade. But that means that the "free" platform will definitely have more users, just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in the fills, and get frontrunning trades)

[gruez]

>just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in the fills, and get frontrunning trades)

Can you provide a source for this? Citadel (one of the companies robinhood sells order flow to) claims in regulatory filings[1] that the overwhelming majority of orders are executed at market price or better, and that they on average save traders money.

[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/citadel-wordpress-prd101/wp-content...

[qaq]

Wha the point of paying for order flow if you "execute at market price or better"? Are you suggesting Citadel is a charity?

[kortilla]

Because they are paying for a supply of (on average) uneducated morons with no edge. Can you imagine how much a professional poker player would pay to be in a tournament with amateurs?

[qaq]

At market or better than market rate you have unlimited supply of trades without paying for order flow

[kortilla]

But the people with the edge are there who can steamroll you. Better to just pay to not have them if you’re trying to make a market.

[qaq]

You have an example of market maker being steam rolled?

[gruez]

>Wha the point of paying for order flow if you "execute at market price or better"?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-05/robinh...

tl;dr: adverse selection. retail traders are less risky to deal with, so market makers can offer better prices to them.

>If the retail trades are random. If retail traders usually buy before the stock goes up, and sell before the stock goes down, the wholesaler would consistently lose money on price risk. (This is called “adverse selection.”) But they don’t. Even now, retail traders tend to be small, dispersed and uninformed. If you sell stock to a retail trader for $58.15, you have no particular reason to think it will go up (or down). The retail traders are trading randomly, which is what allows you to treat this problem as though you were matching them up with each other at a fixed price and collecting a spread. In reality you are matching them up with each other over time, not simultaneously, and the price moves while you are doing it, but the randomness of their trading means that this difference doesn’t matter too much.

>Meanwhile market makers on the public exchange are doing something similar, but with institutional traders who tend to be informed and trade large lots of stock, so their trading does carry a lot more risk of adverse selection. If a big institution buys some stock, that does mean the stock is somewhat more likely to go up, so if you sell them the stock you are somewhat more likely to lose money. This is why the spread on the public exchange—the difference between the $58 best bid to buy the stock and the $58.25 best offer to sell the stock—is so much wider than the 5 cents that the wholesaler charges. The wholesaler is just matching up small pleasant random orders and clipping a spread; the stock-exchange market maker is facing a real risk of being run over by an informed trader.

[qaq]

show me a liquid stock with .25 spread

[gruez]

The numbers are given as examples, not as real figures. If you look at the document from my prior comment the price improvement (and therefore spreads that citadel makes) is on the order of pennies or less.

[colinmhayes]

This isn’t even that complicated. Come on, like think for 15 seconds. Why oh why would a trader pay to play against a degenerate retail gambler?

[qaq]

Expand why would you give retail gambler "better than market" execution?

[bostonpete]

Wow, TIL you can use sed syntax in vi. I'm not a heavy vi user but that's still a handy trick. :-)

[acuozzo]

It comes from ex (the line editor sitting beneath vi).

[kasey_junk]

How are you quantifying that the fills are better?

I worked professionally on this problem a while ago and it was very hard to do even with full depth feeds direct from the exchanges.

[0x457]

I don't know the situation now, but both used to sell their order flow to the same place. I used both and fills for pretty much the same. However, I used tasty platform to set up options and then execute them on RH most of the time.

[sitzkrieg]

price and execution time? how much slip or price improvement on limits? or god forbid the casual retail market orders fill vs nbbo and pools at exec

[kasey_junk]

If you are seeing a venue not meeting nbbo you have a whistleblower suit to make which have been quite lucrative.

When I was doing this for work the issues we ran into came down to a) making the orders hit the tape close enough to ensure similar priority b) the size of the orders changing execution depending on venue c) differences in performance per symbol.

This was in a place that was sending a fair amount of orders in. Even then given the above finding statistical relevance was hard.