Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Since 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission has required brokerage firms to file a quarterly report showing where they are routing their stock trades for execution. The filing is known as a 606 report after Rule 606 of Regulation NMS (National Market System). Because so many traders at Reddit’s WallStreetBets’ message board have focused on the fact that billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities was executing the majority of trades for Robinhood, the trading app where a lot of the Redditors directed their GameStop trades, we decided to take a look at what other online brokers might have also been directing GameStop trades to Citadel Securities.
According to the 606 reports for the fourth quarter of 2020 for the following nine online brokers, Citadel was providing payment-for-order-flow (giving a cash rebate for trade orders directed to it) to each of the following: Robinhood, E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, WeBull, Ally Invest Securities, First Trade and TradeStation. At Fidelity Brokerage Services, it was directing stock and option orders to Citadel Securities but was only receiving payment-for-order-flow on the option orders, according to its 606 report.
According to these 606 reports, Citadel ranked as the number one venue for sending both stock and option orders at the following firms: Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, WeBull, Fidelity Brokerage Services and Ally Invest Securities. Citadel was the number one venue for options trades by E-Trade while ranking lower for stock trades. At First Trade and TradeStation, Citadel ranked number one for market orders for stocks (trades with no stated price limit) and number one for options.
The bottom line here: there was a high probability that no matter what online brokerage firm Redditors sent their GameStop orders to initially, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities was getting a piece of the action in the end. According to the website of Citadel Securities, “To maximize trading opportunities for clients, our automated trading platform sources liquidity from all U.S. exchanges and more than 18 alternative liquidity venues.”
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