[lrm242]

Middlemen have always existed in markets. The middlemen have changed, but as you rightly point out, they now take SIGNIFICANTLY LESS than they used to because competition has forced spreads down to next to nothing. You pick: pay a 0.30 spread on a NYSE listed stock or a 0.01. It's sort of a no-brainer.

The thing that most people seem to be upset about is that now market makers generally have few to no obligations to provide liquidity and they are drastically smarter than they used to be.

Ultimately, unless you are slinging enormous blocks, if you send a marketable order through a retail broker these days you are almost always going to get a better fill than the displayed market. Likewise, if you are a large trader you have to be more sophisticated about how you fill your orders, you can't just lift 100k shares even when 300k are displayed unless you do so with a semi-intelligent execution algo (note: these are everywhere these days, and not using one brings into question the trader/brokers abilities and whether they are even qualified to be in the market).