retail traders get systematically screwed while Wall Street makes billions off our trades

For context, I come from an institutional trading background, so take this as you will. Your "free" trading on Robinhood isn't actually free. When you place a trade, your broker sells your order to a market maker like Citadel for about $0.002 per share. Why would they pay for it? Because they make more money off you than they're paying. They see your order before it hits the market and adjust prices against you. You think you're getting a $50.00-$50.05 spread, but by the time your order executes it's $50.00-$50.08. That extra $0.03 per share goes to them. Do this across billions of shares daily and you're talking billions extracted from retail annually. I'd guess payment for order flow costs retail traders billions per year in worse fills. Meanwhile pros with direct market access pay pennies for better execution.

Then there's the information gap. Market makers see all orders across multiple brokers before they execute because they're paying for that order flow. They have a complete picture of retail demand while you're trading blind. High-frequency traders co-locate servers at exchanges to execute trades in microseconds. When you press buy at $50, they see it, buy ahead of you, and sell it back at $50.02. You lose two cents per share on every trade. About 40% of trades happen in dark pools where institutions get better prices than you do.

On options it's even worse lol. Market makers profit most when options expire worthless at a specific price called max pain. They hedge billions in positions and their orders move markets. Somehow stocks always drift toward max pain by Friday close. You buy a $50 call when stock is at $48, it rallies to $51 Thursday, then drifts back to close at $49.95 Friday. Your call expires worthless. They keep your premium. This happens so consistently it can't be coincidence.

Payment for order flow is banned in Canada, UK, and Europe but thrives in the US because firms like Citadel make billions from it and lobby against reform. You're not necessarily bad at trading, you're just playing a game where the rules extract wealth from retail to Wall Street every single trade.

Retail traders really need better tools. We talk a little bit about this in r/beatingthemarket but the game is really rigged to fail right now. My hope is that advances in AI can start to lower to cost/technical barrier to start giving more people simialr edges, bc regulatory reform is out the window with this current admin.

My advice? buy and hold.