111–120 of 170 posts
You should know in general, though, that no one trades "for free" despite what brokerages say. Your order gets routed, delayed, placed differently, and while you may not immediately see it, your trades are getting a different result than if you explicitly paid a brokerage who charges a commission on it. Learn about "payment for order flow".
(Disclaimer that I'm working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.) This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn't use it as I'm not in the US, and I don't trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I'm seeing. The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar 'mistakes' in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching…
For the US and Robinhood folks: there's a fairly effective project that allows you to do something similar: https://github.com/bcwik9/robinhood-on-rails I used it a bit for fun, seemed legit and worked fine.
(Disclaimer that I'm working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.) This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn't use it as I'm not in the US, and I don't trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I'm seeing. The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar 'mistakes' in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching…
For the US and Robinhood folks: there's a fairly effective project that allows you to do something similar: https://github.com/bcwik9/robinhood-on-rails I used it a bit for fun, seemed legit and worked fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guesing, they are selling order flow. Same like Robin Hood https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/a-controversial-part-of-robi...
So Robin Hood is taking from the rich, giving to the poor, and then turning around and selling the poor out?
Now robin hood _did_ get fined for "not perform[ing] systematic best execution reviews of several order types". If that's what you were referring to then fine. But if your complaint is just about selling order flow you should better understand what that means. Maybe start with patio11's How Brokerages Make Money[0].
[0]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/6/26/how-brokerages-make-mone...
(Disclaimer that I'm working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.) This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn't use it as I'm not in the US, and I don't trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I'm seeing. The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar 'mistakes' in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching…
The proprietary API is guaranteed to be slower. The brokers must send order flow as FIX to the exchange. This adds latency of however long it takes the broker's software to translate to FIX. I don't think there are any successful quant strategies that don't rely on speed, so basically anything with a proprietary API is solely for amateurs.
You should know in general, though, that no one trades "for free" despite what brokerages say. Your order gets routed, delayed, placed differently, and while you may not immediately see it, your trades are getting a different result than if you explicitly paid a brokerage who charges a commission on it. Learn about "payment for order flow".
I don't know why others downvoted you, I didn't. But as general feedback: "learn about X" without linking to some resource about X is really lazy soapboxing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FIX is just a protocol template. Vendors will make non-standard extensions to it. For example: OCO you send to CQG won't work with StoneX.
Of course, and in practice you basically always need to tweak your FIX layer when connecting to multiple brokers. Whilst there will be differences, you can rely on a surprising amount being uniform. The general session/authentication flow and serialisation mechanisms will be largely the same. Or the use of standard fields ClOrdID, or OrderQty. Or the "general" meaning of the messages NewOrderSingle or ExecutionReport…
You should know in general, though, that no one trades "for free" despite what brokerages say. Your order gets routed, delayed, placed differently, and while you may not immediately see it, your trades are getting a different result than if you explicitly paid a brokerage who charges a commission on it. Learn about "payment for order flow".
I don't know why others downvoted you, I didn't. But as general feedback: "learn about X" without linking to some resource about X is really lazy soapboxing.
First paying a commission is not correlated with participation in order flow payment. Commissioned brokers also get paid for order flow.
Second if you interact with an internalizer your order will execute faster not slower. And you will usually be getting better price execution than if you try to route manually.
Third all brokerages have routing tiers that involve self matching/dark pools/contractual discounts etc. Most of them will let you pay for the privilege of using the same router the non-premium orders go through.
At the end of the day if your trade is that sensitive to execution you are not a retail customer and should not be using a retail brokerage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course, and in practice you basically always need to tweak your FIX layer when connecting to multiple brokers. Whilst there will be differences, you can rely on a surprising amount being uniform. The general session/authentication flow and serialisation mechanisms will be largely the same. Or the use of standard fields ClOrdID, or OrderQty. Or the "general" meaning of the messages NewOrderSingle or ExecutionReport…
I have direct experience building the fix layers for integrating a variety of exchanges. I think FIX is a net negative. The standardization provides so little, there are so many murky edge cases in each implementation and the protocol encoding is so bad, I’d rather just program against the proprietary API. On the exchanges at least the binary APIs make so much more sense.
Nonetheless, it'd be great to see brokers in the retail space normalise toward a uniform API. Even if that is a standardised HTTP interface with good WS support for streaming data, or a standardised binary interface. My feel is that FIX is the closest thing we have now that would get us most of the way there, even for all its warts. But of course, I'd be equally keen on anything standardised.
Edit: typo