It would be interesting if someone could open and trade on an account on a PFOF broker vs a non-PFOF one and see where the differences in price / charges are
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I’ll save you the click with a quote
The MIT paper — which was commissioned and paid for by Robinhood — pushes back against that conclusion.
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I prefer to understand the view point and what lies behind it than dismiss with the commission (i.e. paid for) argument … because that AFAIAC is an ad hominem attack.
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You can make data say anything you want and when your paying for the study I think it’s fair for it to be read it with a potential conflict of interest in mind.
RH will do everything they can to protect 75% of their revenues and keep PFOF alive.
@neilb that argument is used to often to dismiss points of view. Case in point is with covid vaccines a refrain of the anti-vaxer has been well big Pharma would say that.
I don’t agree that You can make data say anything you want it behooves of us to look at the data and decide whether the data do support the conclusion that the author states. It is more scientific for us to argue how or why the conclusions don’t follow (that may include arguments about the data itself) etc etc. I am sensitive to this as I have seen a lot of dismissal of science and reasoned arguments with various conspiracy led arguments that are of zero substance.
If we dismiss this sort of paper with the conspiracy sort of argument all we are doing is underlining our own bias.
Naturally I would like prices to be as low as possible - but that is a different discussion.
I think that
underlines the core issue. Transparency is at the heart of this - if that existed then PFOF may or may not exist. People would see that they are being hard done by PFOF or not as the case may be. But to be honest I am not sure how much real difference it would make to many customers … do they for example read the KIID documents or consider TER? Do they ever read Terms and Conditions? For example, someone on this forum was dismissive of the comment that I made that you can’t transfer your FT ISA account to another provider with shares included … you have to sell them and transfer the cash in the ISA. He would not have made the comment if he had read the FT terms and conditions.
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Isn’t the awkward reality we’ve been indirectly supporting and getting our US trades via PFOF for years? Freetrade, Stake and others exclusively route US orders to Drive Wealth. DriveWealths T&Cs are clear on PFOF - they can/do receive payment. Customer Account Agreement V2 — DriveWealth Legal Hub
Payment for Order Flow. When routing customer orders, a broker-dealer may receive “payment for order flow” which includes, among other things, any monetary payment, service, property, or other benefit that results in remuneration, compensation, or consideration to a broker-dealer from any broker-dealer or exchange in return for routing orders. In exchange for routing certain customer equity orders to exchanges, electronic communication networks, or broker-dealers during normal business hours, DriveWealth may receive monetary rebates. The amount rebated varies depending on the agreement reached with each market venue and will be furnished upon request. These practices do not figure into where DriveWealth routes orders, but rather DriveWealth considers the size of the order, the opportunity for price improvement and the quality of order executions, and decisions are regularly reviewed to ensure the duty of best execution is met.
So… your US trade price is a result of PFOF and users of DriveWealth are indirectly benefiting from PFOF by way of (likely) slightly lower DriveWealth service charges (as opposed to directly receive payments themselves - which they are not).
Either way a bit of an elephant in the room. 
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The list of EEA countries backing scammers…but wait a minute, there is only one and no surprise there as everyone knows which company they do it for:
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