they’d save all sorts of money in fees they paid to the public exchanges—by putting together buyers and sellers of the same stocks who came to RBC at the same time. If RBC had some investor who wanted to buy a million shares of Microsoft, and another who wanted to sell a million shares of Microsoft, they could simply pair them off in the dark pool rather than pay Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange to do it. In theory this made sense; in practice, not so much. “The problem,” said Brad, “was RBC was two percent of the market. I asked how often we were likely to have buyers and sellers to
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