> Effectively all retail flow already goes through even more cutoff special channels? But I agree with the point, this seems like adding a tremendously complex

> Effectively all retail flow already goes through even more cutoff special channels? But I agree with the point, this seems like adding a tremendously complex game instead of just shrinking tick sizes. At least in options, you tend to have much wider spreads. But the fact that plenty of stocks trade at min tick is a sign the spreads could naturally be tighter. This is true, except the key factor is that the price signal eventually reaches the "normal" market when you look at the trading patterns of the wholesalers, mixing it in with the price signals coming from the trades that the wholesaler does for other clients (including their own strategies). Moving to an entirely separate public information channel means that 100% of the trading activity on the markets (aside from the separate channel) is driven by sophisticated parties. That makes a big difference - for example, during the GME fiasco, there was uncertainty about how much of the activity was retail vs institutional traffic. After the proposed rule, we will know exactly how much of that flow is retail.