Draft talk:Comparison of online trading platforms

Questions about Payment For Order Flow / Liquidity Sources / Order Routing
As of this edit Special:Permalink/1014209449 (19:52, 25 March 2021‎) the Online Trading Platforms table (only for USA for now) was altered splitting the the ATS/MTF/Dark Pools column into three columns, inspired by page 36 of https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hhrg-117-ba00-bio-kelleherd-20210317.pdf

Does this make sense? Is it labeled/named correctly? Also, what is a reliable way to understand how to recognize source-citeable information that confirms whether or not a brokerage offers these in a **yes** or **no** simple way? I have a suspicion that there may be some brokerages/online trading platforms that have a **no** answer to the "Lit pool / National Market System" column even though prior to January 2021, I would have assumed 100% of all brokerages would be a **yes** answer, but given recent events, that possibly seems to not be the case. For a month now I've been trying to wrap my head around understanding this type of information well enough to factually and correctly fill in these columns, along with citing sources for each platform/publisher/service provider/trading platform/brokerage (whatever wording is best to call everything). Jasonkhanlar (talk) 04:58, 1 May 2021 (UTC)


 * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-04/family-offices-payments-to-brokers-are-in-democrats-crosshairs suggests banning payments for order flow Jasonkhanlar (talk) 07:12, 5 May 2021 (UTC)


 * https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/payment-for-order-flow-bill Jasonkhanlar (talk) 09:46, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Are these columns appropriate to be in the Online Trading Platforms table?
Definitely Payment For Order Flow / Liquidity Sources / Order Routing affects Stock Brokerages, therefore it makes sense to apply in the Stock Brokerages table, except, I am not sure because if these columns of information also apply to all other brokerages/trading services (bonds/commodities/forex/mutual funds/real estate investment trusts/etc) then that's why it's in the Online Trading Platforms table, but I am not sure about this yet. Does anyone know? I just started learning about stocks since February 2021. Jasonkhanlar (talk) 04:58, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Are there more than 3 sub-columns?
For the **Payment for order flow/Liquidity sources** column, split into sub-columns, do these three sub-columns cover every possibility?

Jasonkhanlar (talk) 04:58, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Internalizer / High-frequency trading
 * Alternative trading system / Multilateral trading facility / Dark pool
 * Lit pool / National market system

No?
I just removed LiquidNet and Nomura Holdings because they don't appear to be the kind of online trading platforms that are open to the general public, and seem to only offer private dark secret services. Also https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/dark-pools and https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/dark-pool-traders-find-mifid-workarounds-to-stay-in-the-shadows mentions them as well; something about MiFID II imposing unprecedented transparency in Europe. https://otctransparency.finra.org/ provides ATS (dark pool?) data as well as https://www.sec.gov/foia/docs/atslist.htm as mentioned in the Bloomberg article on "dark pools" Also https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/systematic-internalizers-will-change-trading-quicktake-qa/ suggests that due to restrictions on dark pools, Systematic Internalizers were created by the banks to maintain dark pool-like trading. I can't find anything other than the 3 sub-columns. I assume the answer is "no." Jasonkhanlar (talk) 06:07, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

How to identify source-citeable information?
How is it possible to identify source-citeable information to indicate a **yes** or **no** answer for these columns for each row? For example, for Ally Invest, I found https://www.ally.com/invest/disclosures/order-routing-and-payment-for-order-flow.html and looking at https://www.ally.com/resources/pdf/invest/order-routing/1st-quarter-2021-606-report.pdf in the **Material Aspects** part it mentions:

CITADEL SECURITIES LLC: Ally Invest Securities LLC received payment for certain equity orders routed to and executed by Citadel. Payment was based on order type, size and time of day. G1 Execution Services, LLC: Ally Invest Securities LLC received payment for certain equity orders routed to and executed by G1 Execution Services. Payment was based on order type and size. Virtu Americas, LLC: Ally Invest Securities LLC received payment for certain equity orders routed to and executed by Virtu. Payment was based on order type, size and time of day. Apex Clearing Corporation: Ally Invest Securities LLC received payment and was charged fees for certain equity orders routed to its clearing frm, Apex Clearing Corp., pursuant to an agreement between the parties.

and that information seems close to practically suggest (in my opinion) that Ally Invest does indeed use ATS/MTF/Dark pools, but I still have no idea how to confirm or deny this. I don't know how to comprehend if this is source-citeable information that can be referenced along with an answer. Does anyone know better?

Additionally, it appears that some brokerages possibly have a **no** answer to the **Lit pool / National market system** column, such that those brokerages go out of their way to make it practically impossible to have access to that level of trading, and instead only offer reaching that level of access through the previous two columns: ATS/MTF/Dark pool or Internalizer/HFT, but again I am not sure how to source-citeably identify this type of information either, despite recent events since January 2021. Does anyone know about this also? Jasonkhanlar (talk) 04:58, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Regarding continuing updating this article
Regarding continuing updating this article that I created, at the time just before I created it, I was trying to find existing information that comparingly simplified these kinds of things so that I could have an easier time to make sense of everything, but since I couldn't find anything similar, knowing practically zero things to begin with, I decided to try to prepare organizing the source citeable information as I learned along the way. Fast forward to now, all that I've learned so far, and even since months ago, half a year ago, and before, I started to consider that most of these informations will be practically useless or deprecated in future, replaced by either alternative financial infrastructure systems and companies or otherwise a lot of redundant work (for me or others) to revise all of the columns of data that otherwise was or could have been populated to complete this article (which is now a draft). In any case, I will eventually continue to progress working on this article to prepare it to a more completed state, but also I will wait until after certain future events unfold to occur that likely will drastically affect the relevant information.

A side note: I also briefly introducingly learned about CFD (Contract For Difference) Brokerages, which appear to be different than Stock Brokerages, or otherwise some kind of overlap, and I have previously considered whether to either include it as a separate table entry, or integrated as a column in the stock brokerages tables.

Also note: Back around April/May/June 2021, as I was making phone calls to a lot of the financial companies listed in this article to gather information to fill in columns that I couldn't find information for, and seeking for source citeable linked web pages or documents to link to, many of the employees at the firms were saying things as if to suggest that I knew more than they did (as per creating this article, that I also mentioned to them and they glanced at it), and the difficulty many such employees had to not be able to quickly or conveniently find some of the informations to answer my questions, I couldn't help but think of how ridiculous it must be if I try to persist reaching out to the companies more than once per question each, such that if they don't know, then they don't know, and asking more than once probably won't make them all of a sudden know. I didn't experience this too significantly to be problematic, but not only the first time I experienced this, but several times with different contacts at corporations, I couldn't help but ponder about this. I think in terms of stock brokerages versus contract for difference brokerages (or other financial institution sophisticated/complexity things), this probably may explain the phenomena. But otherwise, I'm not an expert in any way, and I merely started this article to try to help learn and understand things. Jasonkhanlar (talk) 15:31, 18 August 2022 (UTC)