<i>Individual investors, trading through brokers like Charles Schwab, E-Trade and TD Ameritrade, suffer first as the brokers profit by hundreds of millions of dollars from selling their retail orders to high-frequency traders and again as those traders take advantage of the orders they bought.</i><p>What&#x27;s the argument here? Retail order flow is sold to HFT shops because it&#x27;s assumed all around that retail flow is uninformed. HFT shops are incentivized to compete for those orders, because no matter who gets them, they&#x27;re assumed to be lucrative to trade against. Things wouldn&#x27;t be any better for retail investors if their orders made it all the way to &quot;the exchange&quot;.