‘No evidence that PFOF harms price execution,’ finds new research

Seemingly massive editorialization going on here.

Money shot from the article:

>However, new research indicates that the current disclosure regime is insufficient and provides limited information regarding the quality of price execution across brokers – largely due to the difficulty in comparing the actual retail price execution quality of different brokers.

>“Self-reporting is haphazard and inconsistent across brokers,” noted the paper. “All brokers claim to provide ‘price improvement’ over the National Best Bid Offer (NBBO) price, a benchmark that is easily beaten, albeit often narrowly.”

"The data that would be required to make a measurement is not available in our current reporting regime" is a hell of a different thing to say than "the data is in, and 'paying for order flow' has no adverse effects or indicators that the order flow information is being used to modify the order in which transactions are executed by brokers."

Given the insane level of technicality and jargon in the space it may not be off in exactly the way I'm thinking, but I know a report saying "we ain't got sufficient metrics" from "all data indicates" when I see one.