As a small trader, you get access to special lower prices that a hedge fund can't get. Your broker will be routing your order to a wholesaler who will fill it at lower prices (ie, narrower spreads) than you would get on the open market, because they have a legal obligation to not screw you over.
You can request that they route it to anywhere you want, and they are legally obligated to do it if you ask, but you really don't want to do that. Unless you like giving money away of course.
(Also, you don't seem to understand basic market mechanics. You use words like "scraped" or "picked up" which are nonsensical in context.)
IEX recently suggested that retail investors should request their broker to route their orders to IEX, for which they got criticised very harshly. And rightly so.
This is incorrect. We destroyed a Barron's article for making similarly false claims and we back it up with solid data: http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4685.html We even caught Barron's cheating! The nerve of some people to lie with abandon.
As a small trader I don't get paid to provide liquidity. A hedge fund may.
I used the word scrape in response to tptacek's response below my above post. If a trader is not aware that what tptacek describes is happening to their orders, then I believe my characterization is accurate.
As a small investor, your order is probably routed to a wholesaler like Citadel, where you will get a better price than you would otherwise get.
And you are upset because you incorrectly believed that your order would be routed somewhere else (where, exactly?), where you would get a worse price, which you think would be better because...why?
> I believe my characterization is accurate.
It's not even slightly accurate; it's literally the opposite of the truth.
As a small trader, you get access to special lower prices that a hedge fund can't get. Your broker will be routing your order to a wholesaler who will fill it at lower prices (ie, narrower spreads) than you would get on the open market, because they have a legal obligation to not screw you over.
You can request that they route it to anywhere you want, and they are legally obligated to do it if you ask, but you really don't want to do that. Unless you like giving money away of course.
(Also, you don't seem to understand basic market mechanics. You use words like "scraped" or "picked up" which are nonsensical in context.)
IEX recently suggested that retail investors should request their broker to route their orders to IEX, for which they got criticised very harshly. And rightly so.