What you're describing is illegal activity and no brokerage engages in anything remotely close to it. It's quite frustrating since I actually work for an HFT f

What you're describing is illegal activity and no brokerage engages in anything remotely close to it. It's quite frustrating since I actually work for an HFT firm and the amount of misinformation about it in this comment thread is absolutely overwhelming. I don't even know where to start to debunk so many of the claims being made about front-running, or how paying for order flow works... all I can say is that reading through these comments really reinforces the point that plenty of people without any experience or background in a topic will talk about it as if they are experts in that field and there's no way to know who is and isn't knowledgeable on certain technically sophisticated topics. Basically, take a topic that you're an expert in, find a discussion about that topic on the Internet and see just how much misinformation there is out there about it. Now consider all the topics you're not an expert in but read about on Internet discussion forums and you have to conclude that most of what people say is basically conjecture, speculation, and rumors with no sensible way to discern who is who. It's kind of depressing.