Thereās a lot of misinformation in this thread so hard to address it all.
To be clear, if you place and order for an LSE-listed stock or ETF it is going to be filled by the exact same network of market makers (aka Retail Service Providers or RSPs) that almost every other retail stockbroker in the UK uses. That includes Hargreaves Lansdown, Interactive Investor, Barclays and AJ Bell.
Any suggestion that we are adding a āmarkupā or āadditional spreadā is categorically false.
For instant trades we automatically execute the order with the market maker that comes back with the best price the fastest. Legacy stockbrokers typically add another step to show the quote for a certain amount of time and ask the user to then accept or reject it. We wonāt automatically execute an order unless the quote given is inside the bid-ask spread observable on the LSE order book - this sometimes causes rejected orders if market makers arenāt giving quotes that meet our requirements for best execution.
Orders for US-listed stocks are a bit different because we currently send those orders to the same LSE market makers, who also make a market in some US stocks. They provide quotes in GBP, so there is an FX conversion baked into the price we get for our customers. The underlying USD quote needs to be within what is called NBBO (Google it).
For US stocks, this will change once we turn on the new Investment Platform as weāll start sending US orders directly to the States instead of LSE market makers (UK orders will stay over here of course). One benefit will be that we will do the FX conversion ourselves, so better FX rates than right now.
So again, we go out to the market to get the best price we can for our customers on all orders. We monitor best execution and do not make money in any hidden ways.