Market makers were paying for order flow when I had to pay a $20 commission to sell my equity based compensation, and they still paid for order flow when I had to pay a $0 commission.

I'm much happier paying $0 than $20 for the privilege of turning my compensation into cash. The spreads decreased a bit over that time too, which is also nice.

$0 commissions are huge, and allow people to (Along with partial stock buys) invest little amounts on a recurring basis.

Robinhood forced the major brokers to do $0 stock trades, just need a few others to do $0 option trades too. The fees aren't crazy, but they add up if you do lots of spreads.

Paid brokerages charge you money AND still sell your order flow.

Matt Levine has explained that even before the fees going to zero, the fees represented a small percentage of brokerage revenues. Elimination of the fees had an almost negligible effect on brokerage bottom lines—certainly not enough to change their entire behaviour.

> Commissions are way down there; in 2018, they represented a bit less than 7% of Schwab’s net revenue.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-02/the-tr...