This could be of interest for those who actively trade stocks.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pricing-of-stock-trades-varies-…
**Pricing of Stock Trades Varies Widely Among Popular Brokers, Study Finds**
**TD Ameritrade delivered best prices in professors’ experiment, while Interactive Brokers lagged behind**
**By Alexander Osipovich, The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 16, 2022**
__A recent academic study found wide disparities in the prices that investors get when buying and selling stocks through a half dozen popular brokerages. TD Ameritrade delivered the best prices, the study found, followed by Fidelity Investments, E*Trade and Robinhood Markets Inc.__
**In a surprise to some investors, at the bottom of the pack were a pair of trading platforms from Interactive Brokers Group Inc. — a brokerage catering to day traders that has long touted its execution quality....**
**To do the study, the authors spent their own money to buy and sell stocks 85,000 times over a nearly six-month period, attempting to place the same trades simultaneously with different brokers and measuring the prices they got. Mr. Schwarz said he and his colleagues lost about $23,000 doing the trades. They didn’t receive funding from Wall Street for the study....**
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Here is the link to the study.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4189239
**Abstract**
**We compare execution quality of six brokerage accounts across five brokers by generating a sample of 85,000 simultaneous market orders. Commission levels and payment for order flow (PFOF) differ across our accounts. We find that execution prices vary significantly across brokers: the mean account-level round-trip cost ranges from –0.07% to –0.45% excluding any commissions. The dispersion is due to off-exchange wholesalers systematically giving different execution prices for the same trades to different brokers. Across brokers, variation in PFOF cannot explain the large variation in price execution. We provide several suggestions for more informative disclosures on execution quality.**
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As a risk-averse investor, I’m anything but an active stock trader. This doesn’t impact me, but others might find it useful.
Wendy