NPR's marketplace also touched on this over the last week, and does a decent job laying out the basics. Generally speaking - I think we're seeing the same dile

NPR's marketplace also touched on this over the last week, and does a decent job laying out the basics. Generally speaking - I think we're seeing the same dilemma here you see with digital advertising: The "customer" now pays no trading fees, but because they're no longer funding the activity through those fees, they start to become the product sold, and the actual customer getting catered to is now the brokerage paying the best PFOF... which they can likely do because they inflate their earnings by taking a larger cut, which means the original "customer" is still likely paying anyways, but they now have no recourse and no say in how they are bought and sold. I'm not at all a fan of the kind of perverse incentives that pop up when you have to trust an agent, and that agent is getting paid better by someone else to fuck you. We have fiduciary duty laws for a reason - this situation leads to bad places. For comparison - the vast majority of EU states have this banned as under their inducement to trade laws.