Today is also a very special day for another reason: it actually marks my two year anniversary on the interwebs my first year. I was trying to make some content and it's super cringe-worthy. Let's be honest: if you go back to anything from my early days, man, oh man, if you're feeling down watch that it'll make you on a relative basis, feel better than yourself and to commemorate this event, i wanted to, i guess, make a video here about. I guess some of the biggest things i've learned more so in the latter half in the most recent year - and these are just my own opinions - i'm no financial advisor, but i wanted to share my thoughts on.

Maybe maybe this will be a video that you could share it with someone of what are the apes fighting for? What should the apes be fighting for? What's going on and a lot of this stuff, it gets fairly complex and obviously, when you pull on a thread, it could always lead to many many other things, but i wanted to sum it up in two specific things. As many of you know, i have a passion for the markets and i would love to make the stock market more transparent, more equitable, more fair. I want it to be a level playing field and i think there are many things that can be done, but if i were to make a list of two, if i had a magic wand - and i could just wave it and fix those two things, this is What would be on that list number one? I would fix the extreme amount of off exchange trading using amc and gme as an example. They pretty much do represent almost every major equity that you're going to know about right now, over 50 50 on a daily basis.

On average is not executed on a lit exchange. Think of the new york stock exchange, the nasdaq iex, it's not being done there. No, it's just not it's off exchange. There are two types of off exchange trading uh and the major one are retail wholesalers such as citadel securities or virtu, and a portion of that the other one ats alternative trading system, aka a dark pool over 50 percent of almost every major equity is not traded On a lid exchange, which has more transparency, we're in this world, where you have off exchange trading, is looking inside they're looking inside on the bubble they're on the outside they're, looking at the price of what's going on there and then they're executing it and not really A secondary market, but for more of a metaphor, i think that's the easiest way to think of it.

They're, like hey equity xyz, is trading out this price. Okay, we have our own market going on and we're gon na base it on that. This hampers price discovery. This you don't have to take my word for it.

I know i'm just a person yelling at a camera. You can take the president, the ex-president of the new york stock exchange, stacey cunningham. You can also take various academic papers. Who've said yeah.

This is going on and it's not a good thing. Why is it not a good thing? That is a great question. What it's doing beyond really, i guess, increasing the fragility of the overall market, because all this off exchange trading is basically facilitated by one of two main players: citadel securities and virtue when you have that much power concentration in so minimal players. That is not good.

So when really things hit the fan we're relying on them to keep it going. One of them citadel was bragging that when gamestop went haywire in january of 2021, they were the only one that continuously provided liquidity. That's not good! If our failsafe is one for-profit company, that is not a good scenario. Some people will disagree with this.

Other people will disagree. I wholeheartedly believe our market, our entire market system, was almost brought to its knees by one video game selling company gamestop. That is not good. That is not a robust system beyond the fact that it's not a robust system.

You also have to talk about how this is being done. Why are they executing so much traits it's because of robin hood? It's because of weibo it's because of payment for order flow. Also known as pfoff, what it is is basically your orders as you're executing whether you're trying to buy yourself from these brokers that order flow payment for order flow is being sold right to citadel right to virtue, and unless they don't want to take the trade. They are executing it.

There is a scenario in where they could kick it off to a dark pool or to a lid exchange that rarely really happens if you're buying they're selling to you. If you're selling they're buying off you, you are not getting into a lid exchange, you are not getting normal price discovery. You are not getting an efficient execution. Gary gensler, the sec chairman himself, said in may of 2021.

Robin hood explicitly went out of its way to accept higher payment for order flow in return for worse quality execution for its clients. In fact, he even continued by saying it was so bad in some circumstances that it would have been better to be on a commission brokerage. That's how bad it's getting! What this system is doing, this commissionless brokerage, where they're all going to citadel all going to virtue it successfully successfully. Excuse me segments the entire retail trading public away from lit exchanges, so you have retail here and then all of a sudden, you just have a super, highly competitive players on lit exchanges, and what this does is to make that market.

The market makers have to widen the bid and ask spread the nbbo national best bid and offer this. There are some estimates that, because retail has been successfully segmented, it spreads the bid by 20. Some people say 25. This costs etfs pension funds, billions and billions of dollars over the course of a year because they are playing in a system where the spreads are wider.

The competition is all on lit exchanges. Retail is successfully off of it, you're not getting quality execution and it really all comes from the very convoluted complex system of payment for order flow. Inducements incentives, rebates, it's all this stuff that is already outlawed in so many countries, canada, uk australia. They don't allow for this stuff.

This isn't something that, like okay, like we're leading the edge on it, we are the last ones to the party on fixing something that is clearly a conflict of interest. Obviously, a conflict of interest and if you want to get into some specifics that are related to this of other things that we can fix, fails to deliver. Basically, either someone didn't have the stock or someone didn't have the cash those reports. They are very, very opaque.

We don't get any useful information and even the little tidbit the morsel, the miniscule amount of information we do get from it. We get it late. The reporting is super slow and it's not really useful. It's not detailed in any manner, and then you could also talk about how they're, taking advantage and they're pulling this off through the settlement cycle.

We used to be on a five-day settlement cycle. Then we were on a three-day settlement cycle, we're currently on a two-day settlement cycle, and this one isn't the hottest topic to really fight, because there are a fair amount of people like yeah. We need to get this like even lower. It just makes more sense, but they're, taking advantage of that multiple day window to do some of these egregious egregious things, and that leads to particular events of like when it all culminates.

That's when we're seeing the buy button getting taken away from us when we're literally being like those profits were stolen. No one will ever change my mind that the buy button removal was just new age brokerage theft. No one will ever ever switch my mind on that. One because that's exactly what it was in any other scenario, if you didn't have fancy wall street people and highly paid politicians connecting all the dots.

Without that scenario, people would end up in jail for this, but because of the way it happened and the people involved in it, no one bats, an eye, that's crazy, and that brings me to major issue number two. The political involvement in wall street is beyond disheartening. It is downright disgusting. There is an egregious abuse of power that leads to what i would say and remember i'm not a lawyer.

I don't speak legalese, but i would my opinion is that it is insider trading using knowledge from your position to make really bets on the financial markets and you're benefiting off that to me, that is insider trading, which is egregious and right now they're talking about it And you see some politicians switching their mind, but they're only doing it to really appease the constituents. After say, they saw the polls of how many people that they're pissing off so that just shows how much of a backbone they don't have anyway, because they're fickle and they're just looking at poles and they're like well. I should do or say this because that's how i'm gon na get reelected, because i wouldn't want this gravy train to really leave but beyond it. I would take it a step further.

We live in a time where it's a borderline political necessity, and this relates to not only politicians who are going to be voting on our taxes, but also the federal reserve, who decides our monetary policy. It's become a borderline political necessity to keep your office to keep your position by keeping the market going higher and higher and higher and higher. This has led to so so many problems, the most recent one being the fact that we're at a staring right in the face a four decade, high level of inflation - and you want to know the kicker to that of how this is all intertwined with politicians. Being the scumbags that they are and everyone else in between is, are you getting paid? More? Are labor payments going up? Technically they are, but unfortunately they are not going up at the same rate relative to inflation, as in the value you're getting even though you're technically getting paid slightly more, it's really a net loss.

This is not some fictitious feeling that you're having out of nowhere that it feels like you, are digging yourself in a hole, deeper and deeper and deeper. This is what this system is, and it would take a lot of convincing from someone with a far bigger brain than myself to really explain it to me how it's not initially designed that way. I strongly believe that's what this system was meant to do. Wall street was there to nickel and dime everyone in a complex plumbing system, and then no one's even allowed to kind of point the finger out and be like.

Should we fix this because the people who can fix it they want that overall system to continue to go, because not on top of the fact that they're making money, which is clear but look at who's donating we're in a world where wall street donates to congress? That's how they get elected, then they're going to always be helping out their wall street cronies and, on top of it the watchdogs, the sec. Guess who pays the sec it's congress? Are we really expecting the sec to bite the hand that feeds them and then so wall street is paying congress? Congress pays the sec and then we're expecting the sec to do something about the people who are funding it or directly the people who are paying them. This is a triangle from hell that does not make sense. So, overall, that's what i feel right here.

First, two things: i would fix the extreme amount of off exchange trading, which leads to inducements incentives, payment for order flow, failed to deliver reporting all that good stuff settlement cycle and then also on more of a general level. The interconnection between politics, wall, street and congress. It has to go because the way it's set up right now we have borderline zero trust. I don't even know why we're saying borderline, because no one is waking up and saying man, i'm so happy.

I can trust the government i'm so happy. I can trust wall street literally, not a fucking person on this planet is waking up day over day and saying that, because it's not true, we have no trust. So are there many other things that have to be fixed in the current system? 100? But i'm saying these two particular things would be an amazing step in the right direction and i just figured i'd share those two with all of you, because it is the two-year anniversary. Now, maybe you agree with these opinions? Maybe you don't, but i would love to get your thoughts in a comment below, because i always learn so much from all of you who end up watching these videos.

Thank you.