Oct. 24 at 10:51 PM
$MSOS $HITI $GTBIF $TCNNF $CURLF
Roughly half of all US equity trades now happen away from public exchanges.
Those trades are routed internally inside firms like Citadel, Virtu, Susquehanna, and the big banks’ internalizers before ever touching the open market.
They act as private exchanges, capturing both sides of retail order flow and keeping spreads and data for themselves.
That gives them near total visibility into retail sentiment and positioning — and lets them trade against or ahead of it, without showing their hand.
It also enable them to make large positions without running up the price.