Empower your legal sales order flow with a cost-effective solution

How to create outlook signature

this is uh rocked uh the marketplace the debate over payment for order flow coming uh into uh relief if you will or high relief uh in in this whole situation around uh gamestop and and what that conversation's created but uh curious what you thought of and and whether you believe right now it really is on the table has there been communication between uh your firm and the sec overpayment for order flow yeah look undoubtedly uh it is on the table when gary says something like that uh chairman genzler uh it's uh for sure and you know in my heart though andrew and you know i've got a lot of experience at the sec i think they're gonna take a deep look at this issue i think they have to by law go through a very arduous process right they have to go through notice and comment rule making they have to take comments in they have to study this issue and when they do that and this will take time but when they do that they're going to arrive at the conclusion that payment for order flow is undoubtedly an amazingly good thing for retail investors and they're not going to ban it so i think we're going to go through a process here we look forward to engaging with the sec with chairman gensler and his staff on these issues but i i think that the overwhelming evidence that we see is that payment for flow is so good for retail investing and from our perspective at robin hood it's the lifeblood right of no commission no minimum balance brokerage this is what has brought in a whole new generation of investors millions and millions of investors speak to this issue though when we've talked to ken griffin at citadel and uh the ceo of virtue on the other side both of whom provide uh this service of payment for order flow do you believe as a as apparently gary gensler does that your customers are not necessarily getting the best possible price they could i i think we're getting excellent prices for our customers i think our execution quality statistics prove that out i think you've heard doug sifu very convincingly and clearly show the numbers which clearly lay out that the price improvement for retail customers when using wholesale market makers is much better than you'd get on exchanges so you know again i think the overwhelming evidence here is that the current market structure works well for reasons if you're right though why do you think gary gensler's not just putting it on the table but he has been pretty blunt about his view that there's a possibility that customers are not getting the quote best price now best price is different than an excellent price that's that's that's a separate component of this and then the other issue on top of it is what kind of data firms like citadel are really getting and how they may or may not be using that data and of course we've heard from firms from those firms saying they don't use that data but nonetheless gary gensler seeming to take the side of some of the folks on reddit and others that have questioned that yeah look on the the data issue you should know that the amount of data that the wholesalers receive as we send the orders over is very very limited it's very specific to the order being executed and again doug sifu i think would be the most clear on that issue so far that they're not using data for any purpose other than to execute the order and uh but look it's a good issue i'm not saying any of this is not ripe or interesting for the sec to look at i do think andrew to go back to your your first statement about this being related to gamestop it's not related to game stop this is a a false narrative like so many other false narratives happen here in washington that somehow payment for order flow or gamification uh was the reason for the gamestop january 28th uh saga right you know there was a false narrative about what happened on that day there was a false narrative of collusion between hedge funds and retail firms like ours when that was proven to be false everyone moved on to something else that's been sitting around in the gadfly universe for years but clearly one of the issues is how much effectively the citadels of virtue are skimming off the top uh and and what that really means to the customer now it may very well be that that's still a good deal i i don't you're not gonna you won't dissuade me from the view that it might actually be a very good deal but how do you convince the public of that when there are going to be times where the the customer is going to lose it may be on the whole that everybody wins but on a very micro level it may be different right yeah look i think the customers uh we need to be clear in our communications with customers about our protocols right the way we root orders has nothing to do with the amount of payment ford or flow we receive we charge the same to all the market makers and we route our orders to the to the market center that's going to give our customer the best execution and so again we need to be uh clear about that but i think the notion of skimming off the top what we're really talking about here andrew is a spread right a spread between the bid and the ask as represented by the nbbo the national best bid and offer the market maker captures some they give some of that to us and piff and they give uh price improvement to the customers and that's that's as old as uh as time memorial here