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> The thing retail is supposed to get out of the deal is NBBO, but Robinhood was fined millions for not even providing that Is this true? My understanding is t
by nightpool 5y ago
> The thing retail is supposed to get out of the deal is NBBO, but Robinhood was fined millions for not even providing that
Is this true? My understanding is that Robinhood was fined millions for taking more PFOF (vs price improvement) than they disclosed. At no time were they below NBBO for the vast majority of their trades—the difference was just that they were only giving consumers 20% of the better then NBBO prices they were getting, which was lower then many other broker-dealers, and taking the other 80% of the spread for themselves. From the SEC order:
For most orders of more than 100 shares, the analysis concluded that Robinhood
customers would be better off trading at another broker-dealer because the additional price
improvement that such orders would receive at other broker-dealers would likely exceed the
approximately $5 per-order commission costs that those broker-dealers were then charging. The
analysis further determined that the larger the order, the more significant the price improvement
losses for Robinhood customers—for orders over 500 shares, the average Robinhood customer
order lost over $15 in price improvement compared to Robinhood’s competitors, with that
comparative loss rising to more than $23 per order for orders over 2,000 shares.
However, the broker-dealers that analysis was comparing Robinhood to charged around $5 for per-order commissions. Whether $15 of price improvement for trades of tens of thousands of dollars is worth $5 of commission fees for small trades is not, to me, an obvious call for Robinhood to make. In total, the SEC determined that Robinhood traders lost $34MM over 2.67 years (or $13 million per year) vs using another brokerage firm, but that that loss was almost certainly concentrated in those doing big trades, and customers trading under 100 shares of stock per transaction were benefitted by Robinhood's policy.
- camgunz 5y agoSure, sorry, by NBBO I mean "this broker isn't overcharging me". Robinhood was.