No net revenue is still the top line number (just minus some things like allowances or some other artifact or exception). Profit is the bottom line.

Not profit then at all is it? As I said

Liquidity providers like Jane Street, Citadel, et al make money on the spread. They also buy order flows from integrators, and retail investor order flows are now a product.

i.e. retail investor → brokerage platform → clearing/execution infrastructure → Jane Street → payment back toward the brokerage side of the chain.

Who captures the economic value created by retail order flow?

Jane Street.

In an ideal market, this product line shouldn't exist. Institutional investors should not be making money on the activity of retail investors.

What incentives determine where that flow is sent, and would investors receive better execution if their orders were exposed to genuinely competitive price formation rather than privately internalised by a concentrated group of wholesalers?

The regulators should be squashing any HFT related or retail order flow, but it's so opaque _by design_ that getting policymakers, or the general public, to understand that retail investors are paying some portion of tax on their $20T USD annual trades to these companies.

Granted, these order flows _sometimes_ work the other way -- and retail users get a better deal on a trade.. But would you really expect the market to be worth what it is, if that was the case less more often than not?

There is a clear and obvious conflict: the broker is supposed to seek the best execution for the customer while potentially being paid by the firm receiving that customer’s order. How can that be, when the broker's in bed with the liquidity providers?

HFT raises pricing for retail traders by allowing front running of trades and makes the market less competitive overall for those without the infrastructure to do so. This isn’t even in question.

Market makers are simply an artifact due to how shares are traded based on limitations that existed before computers. The aren’t some inherent aspect of having a stock market.

The money isn’t coming from thin air. If N people trade a a finite set of shares back and forth every day the only way to extract money from that set of people is for them to lose money.

hedge funds are extremely volatile and tied to capital cycles - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-capital-cycle-theory/

He's offering entertainment not investing advice.

But he is very entertaining and has more than a veneer of authority. His early educational YouTube videos covering topics like derivatives pricing are genuinely very good.

Is there anything he's said in particular that, given the benefit of hindsight, you feel has turned out to be misleading in retrospect?

Speaking for myself only, but if I were going to post a comment like yours on a public forum insinuating doubts about a specific person and vaguely implying their analysis is not trustworthy, I'd come armed with at least once example.

Sort his YouTube videos by date and go to his oldest videos. He didn't used to do that.

So you can blame him for that style lately, but its not all he can do.

It’s good to be weary of any YouTuber. I don’t think he’s a sensationalist. it’s not like he’s saying “don’t listen to those other people, I’ll bring you the -real- info”. And he’s sighting journalists and experts and providing references. When he introduces a framing concept it’s usually from a published book. When other commentators were telling me that big tech was hiding their debts to make their balance sheet look better, he offered a more he offered the more neutral perspective that it’s normal to count purchase agreements that way. But that spreading disclosure of information across so many places so that only the careful notice, leads to partial revelations, where being right doesn’t matter. Which seems a more useful take away than just big tech is being fraudulent about the ai bubble.

That leaves basically nobody.

100%

agree

Almost none of their ops is done there.

They list no jobs there.