February 6, 2022
I have been following the GameStop saga ever since Robinhood and many other brokers who used Apex Clearing as their clearing firm marked GME, AMC, KOSS, and some other stocks Position Closing Only. I believe there is a lot of room for conflict of interest. I no longer trust the fact that brokers hold the shares on behalf of many retail investors as I've seen far too often brokers lend shares even when they are not on margin accounts. Which is why I have decided to Directly Register the shares I hold with the issuer's transfer agent. I believe PFOF should be banned as the benefits it supposedly brings are not as good as the potential risks it carries. For instance it doesn't promote competition but instead guarantees that the firm that pays for the order flow can route the orders as he pleases and can benefit itself way more than the NBB/NBO that is presumably improves. The fact that dark pools are being so heavily used (more than 50% of total orders per day for several days in a row) is a clear example that price discovery is not actually taking place, but instead it seems that a bunch of firms are using wash trading to decrease the price of the underlying securities they are short.