What is Stock Brokerage Company “Payment For Order Flow”?

Posted on May 28, 2024 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA

By Staff Reporters

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Payment for order flow, or PFOF, is a tactic some brokerages use to rake in piles of cash. Payment for order flow (PFOF) is a form of compensation, usually in terms of fractions of a penny per share, that a brokerage firm receives for directing orders for trade execution to a particular market maker or exchange. Payment for order flow is common in options markets, and is increasingly found in equity (stock market) transactions.

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How does it impact everyday investors?

The “P” in PFOF stands for “payment.” That’s because PFOF gets stock brokers paid. It starts when brokers direct trade orders to a particular e-trading firm (like Mountain Securities, for example) instead of routing the trades straight to exchanges. At that point, the e-trading firm may be able to collect the difference between the bid and the ask price, and the brokerages get a cut of that profit. It’s the proverbial “You scratch your broker’s back through their bespoke Ermenegildo Zegna suit, and they’ll scratch yours.”

According to Lillian Stone, some industry experts argue that PFOF is a conflict of interest. (The practice came under scrutiny last year when US brokers made billions on meme stock trading.) You want your broker to get you the best possible prices during a trade, right? Well, if your broker is incentivized to work with one specific e-trading firm, there’s a chance you may not get the sweetest deal—but they’ll line their pockets all the same.

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FRIDAY 13th: Triskaidekaphobia

Posted on October 13, 2023 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA

By Staff Reporters

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Triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13, does not fit neatly into a clinical definition of a specific phobia. The number 13 is not an object or a situation, and it can be impossible for the sufferer to avoid. Moreover, in order for a phobia to be diagnosed, it must significantly impact the sufferer’s life. Most people with triskaidekaphobia find that their fear only arises in certain situations, and does not significantly impair their lives. But could this phobia just be linked to superstition? 

Experts have long debated the scientific validity of triskaidekaphobia. Some feel that it should be classified as superstition or even taken as a sign of magic, which in conjunction with other symptoms, could point to a delusional disorder.

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Fearfully, stocks dropped yesterday as fresh inflation data renewed fears that the Fed will keep rates higher for longer. The Consumer Price Index in September held steady at 3.7%—still a ways off from the Fed’s 2% target for inflation. News was better for Walgreens, whose shares jumped 7% after the pharmacy giant reported smaller losses and showed progress in its plan to cut costs.

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WEEKEND REVIEW: Stock Market Update and China COVID Policy

Posted on November 6, 2022 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA

By Staff Reporters

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  • Markets: Stocks closed their otherwise terrible week on a high note following another solid jobs report for October. The US economy added 261,000 jobs last month, more than expected, though the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.7%. The Fed wants to see the labor market loosen up before it’s willing to slow down its rate hikes.
  • Stock spotlight: Carvana, the online used car retailer that surged during the pandemic, suffered its worst day ever and closed near its all-time low. Carvana’s plunge of more than 95% this year makes it a prime example of Covid darlings that were caught flat-footed when the macroeconomic environment deteriorated and pandemic trends (like huge demand for used cars) snapped back to normal.
  • DraftKings stock had its worst day on record, down nearly 28%, after revealing a longer-than-expected path to profitability.

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Is China going to loosen its Covid policies? Investors pounced on rumors this week that Beijing was thinking about relaxing its draconian Covid precautions, sending Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index to its best week in a decade. Separately, Reuters obtained a recording of a former Chinese disease control official telling a conference that China would be making big changes to its “dynamic-zero” Covid policy.

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#1: The Six Commandments of Value Investing

Posted on March 6, 2022 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA

1. A stock is partial ownership of a business 

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By Vitaliy N. Katsenelson CFA

EDITOR’S NOTE: Although it has been some time since speaking live with busy colleague Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA, I review his internet material frequently and appreciate this ME-P series contribution. I encourage all ME-P readers to do the same and consider his value investing insights carefully.

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The Six Commandments of Value Investing
Introduction

I wrote the core of this chapter in preparation for a speech I gave at an investment conference. In my speech, I wanted to show how at my firm, we took the Six Commandments of Value Investing and embedded them in our investment operating system. 

Since I was speaking to fellow value investors, this speech was written not to promote my firm but to educate. I was going to rewrite the speech for this chapter and make a bit less about us and more about you –but each attempt resulted in a dull chapter. So here is a much extended version of my original speech. 

The Six Commandments

These are the Six Commandments of Value Investing. I don’t expect any value investors reading this to be surprised by any one of them. They were brought down from the mountain by Ben Graham in his book Security Analysis.

1)    A stock is fractional ownership of a business (not trading sardines).
2)    Long-term time horizon (both analytical and expectation to hold)
3)    Mr. Market is there to serve us (know who’s the boss).
4)    Margin of safety – leave room in your buy price for being wrong.
5)    Risk is permanent loss of capital (not volatility).
6)    In the long run stocks revert to their fair value.

These commandments are very important and they sound great, but in the chaos of our daily lives it is so easy for them to turn into empty slogans. 

A slogan without execution is a lie. For these “slogans” not to be lies, we need to deeply embed them in our investment operating system – our analytical framework and our daily routines – and act on them.

The focus of this chapter goes far beyond explaining what these commandments are: My goal is to give you a practical perspective and to show you how we embed the Six Commandments in our investment operating system at my firm. 

1. A stock is partial ownership of a business 

The US and most foreign markets we invest in are very liquid. We can sell any stock in our portfolios with ease – a few clicks and a few cents per share commission and it’s gone. This instant liquidity, though it can be tremendously beneficial (we wish selling a house were that easy, fast, and cheap), can also have harmful unintended consequences: It tends to shrink the investor’s analytical time horizon and often transforms investors into pseudo-investors. 

For true traders, stocks are not businesses but trading widgets. Pork bellies, orange futures, stocks are all the same to them. Traders try to find some kind of order or a pattern in the hourly and daily chaos (randomness) of financial markets. As an investor, I cannot relate to traders –not only do we not belong to the same religion, we live in very different universes. 
Over the years I’ve met many traders, and I count a few as my dear friends. None of them confuse what they do with investing. In fact, traders are very explicit that their rules of engagement with stocks are very different from those of investors. 

I have little insight to share with traders in these pages. My message is really to market participants who on the surface look at stocks as if they were investments but who have been morphed by the allure of the market’s instant liquidity into pseudo-investors. They are not quite traders – because they don’t use traders’ tools and are not trying to find order in the daily noise – but they aren’t investors, either, because their time horizon has been shrunk and their analysis deformed by market liquidity. 

The best way to contrast the investor with the pseudo-investor is by explaining what an investor is. A true investor would do the same analysis of a public company that he would do for a private one. He’d analyze the company’s business, guestimate earnings power and cash flows. Assess its moat – the ability to protect cash flows from competition. Try to look “around the corner” to various risks. Then figure out what the business is worth and decide what price he’d want to pay for it (your required discount to what the business is worth). For an investor, the analysis would be the same if his $100,000 was buying 20% of a private business or 0.002% of a public one. This is how your rational uncle would analyze a business – your Warren Buffett or Ben Graham. 

How do we maintain this rational attitude and prevent the stock market from turning us into pseudo-investors? Very simple. We start by asking, “Would we want to own this business if the stock market was closed for 10 years?” (Thank you, Warren Buffett). This simple question changes how we look at stocks. 

Now, the immediate liquidity that is so alluring in a stock, and that turns investors into pseudo-investors, is gone from our analysis. Suddenly, quality – valuation, cash flows, competitive advantage, return on capital, balance sheet, management – has a much different, more complete meaning.

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