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Comment by jaredeklee13 | Hacker News Reader

That's half of it. The other half is that trading is "commission-free." While technically true, it belies the economics of payment for order flow which results in poor execution. Rather than pay in commissions, users pay in poor prices on the trade.

It did catch up with them, but the headline marketing remains unchanged. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-321

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When I opened my robinhood account, etrade was charging 6.95 per trade. I'm reasonably certain the loss in improvement over best public offer I'm losing or whatever is less than that. It's not "free" but the cost is way, way lower.

>I'm reasonably certain the loss in improvement over best public offer I'm losing or whatever is less than that.

Actually your broker has to execute your order at a better or equal price than the NBBO. I'm presuming that's what you mean by "best public offer", because the price improvements that you get from market makers are definitely not public.

Yes. National Best Bid / Offer. Aka, a best offer made to the general public. The argument is roughly that we're losing out on the price improvements that could have been if Robinhood's fulfillment partner weren't kicking money back to robinhood. But it doesn't hold much water for retail investors -- how much money needs to be trading hands in a given before the delta there is greater than 6.95?

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