The single session thing is annoying. I'm guessing it is related to their various data provider regulations. The large brokers can get around this because, well, you are not really seeing pool depth and the like.
Dark pools are not limited to the "select few". More or less anyone can use a dark pool - Interactive Brokers, for example, lets you access several. I don't know if they still do, but at one time both ETrade and Ameritrade ran a dark pool for their customers. (They call it internal matching, but it's basically the same thing.)
ohh I get it! Basically there's a market of third party companies and the broker has the liberty to choose to who give all its "traffic"/transactions, but the broker is choosing the company based on the fee it gets instead of other factors (which I'm sure there are many) in this case the choice might not be the best for the customers just to the broker.
They offer a product with lower fees for those who qualify. Others say this is standard for a brokerage. Seems like a fee for additional risk in serving less-vetted customers.
Brokers ask about this during the signup process. It's not buried in the TOS or turned on by default without ever asking. My broker devotes an entire page of the signup process to it, and it's easy to decline.
The brokerage won't necessarily do it all for you. Back when I used to gamble on the stock market, my broker would annoyingly only list sales in the document, and it was up to me to comb through my records for each trade's cost basis. Would be a total pain if I was making 10+ tiny trades a day.
Yes. I got that too. I don't want their brokerage, just their funds. I'm paying the $25/year fee. I want separation of functions, for security reasons.
It's great for customers but not so great for "brokers". Securities exchanges in the US are not allowed to let retail customers trade directly and have to go through "brokers" (basically middlemen who take a cut on transactions).
Yeah what an obvious article. Too bad brokers are all locked down by clientIds / passwords and certificates and if you start acting out of the ordinary you will get banned / blocked. Even 1 packet of a large size can cause being blocked in a good production environment.
It’s probably hard to change the UI of an existing brokerage service though. Tons of testing required given the potential size of the transactions involved.
Definitely this. They don't care who gets the orders as long as they're gotten, and assigning the work to people rather than letting people pick from a pool makes them look more like an employer/dispatcher rather than a broker.
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