Rule 5310 is supposed to require your broker to get you the best price it reasonably can. In ten years, enforcing it produced ten paperwork cases and not one dollar returned to a single customer. Now FINRA is asking whether to relax it. Tell them no by September 25.
What's happening
On July 24, 2026, FINRA, the self-regulatory organization that writes and enforces the rules your broker lives under, asked the public whether it should “modernize” its best execution guidance. That guidance is Rule 5310, and it is the rule that says your broker must use reasonable diligence to get you a price “as favorable as possible under prevailing market conditions.”
The timing is not an accident. The SEC has proposed to rescind Rule 611, the Order Protection Rule, and its stated reason is that a broker's best execution duty will cover what's lost. That duty is Rule 5310. It lives in FINRA's rulebook. And FINRA is asking, right now, whether the one part of it that looks at the price you actually got should be relaxed.
FINRA calls its approach “time-tested.” We agree it has been tested. It failed.
Why it matters
We didn't have to build this case. FINRA's own disciplinary database, examination reports, and guidance build it.
Every FINRA best execution action against a retail equity routing firm from 2016 through July 2026 fits on one page. Total fines: $13.15 million. Total restitution: nothing. The median case took seven years to resolve.
Nine consecutive FINRA examination reports describe the same failure in nearly identical words: firms not comparing the executions they obtained against what competing markets would have given their customers.
In June 2021 FINRA reminded every member firm, in writing, that it may not negotiate routing arrangements in a way that cuts into customers' price improvement. That was a restatement of an obligation firms already had. Five years later, not one case has been brought on it.
The Notice asks whether order-by-order review of internalized orders should “continue to be required,” whether a broker's own order router can serve as that review, and whether documented procedures should earn a safe harbor.
The record
Each of these is a “process” case: the firm's review was not regular enough, rigorous enough, or documented enough. In none of them is the price the customer received the violation.
| Firm | Settled | Fine | Restitution | Time to resolve | What FINRA found |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| E*TRADE Securities | 2016 | $900,000 | $0 | ~3 yrs | Review lacked accurate data; an affiliate's routing changes were accepted without analysis. |
| Robinhood Financial | 2019 | $1,250,000 | $0 | ~2 yrs | All four venues paid for order flow; price improvement elsewhere never considered; “hundreds of thousands of orders each month” never reviewed. |
| TradeStation Securities | 2021 | $850,000 | $0 | ~7 yrs | Routed to the venues paying the most PFOF and the highest rebates, with no execution quality analysis. |
| Deutsche Bank Securities | 2022 | $2,000,000 | $0 | ~8 yrs | Sent orders to its own ATS first despite fill rates there of 12% to 32% versus over 90% at exchanges. |
| Barclays Capital | 2022 | $2,000,000 | $0 | ~8.5 yrs | Sent orders to its own ATS first despite inferior fill rates in every quarter from 2015 through Q1 2019. |
| Open to the Public Investing | 2023 | $500,000 | $0 | ~3 yrs | Execution quality “reviews” consisted of reading the clearing firm's Rule 606 reports; no comparison to competing markets; payment for order flow not disclosed. |
| Interactive Brokers | 2023 | $3,500,000 | $0 | ~9 yrs | Preferenced IOI venues without evaluating price improvement; month-end rebate-tier routing never assessed. |
| SpeedTrader (formerly Mint Global) | 2024 | No fine | $0 | ~7 yrs | Review was a manual check of ten random executions every two weeks; roughly 100 million shares a year routed to net-trading broker-dealers interposed between the firm and the best market. No fine “due to the firm's financial status”; an independent consultant instead. |
| Folio Investments | 2026 | $1,300,000 | $0 | ~9 yrs | Routed to two market centers that paid for order flow, then to an affiliate, and never compared them to competing markets. |
| tastytrade | 2026 | $850,000 | $0 | 6.7 yrs | 8.8 million orders routed exclusively to five market makers that paid for order flow, never compared to competing venues. |
| Ten cases, ten years | $13,150,000 | $0 | 7 yrs median | Zero quantified harm. Zero wholesalers charged for retail routing. Zero cases on the terms of a payment-for-order-flow arrangement. |
These are the cases about where a firm chose to send your order, drawn from all 127 of FINRA's monthly disciplinary reports from January 2016 through July 2026. Four of the ten carry 2014 matter numbers: FINRA opened a best execution sweep in 2014 and closed its last case from it in December 2023. Four carry 2017 numbers, from a sweep announced in January 2018 to examine payment for order flow specifically; it produced its first case in December 2019 and its last in July 2026. Eight and a half years of examining zero-commission brokers produced four settlements, three fines totaling $3.4 million, one firm too financially weak to fine, and no restitution. During those same years, Robinhood alone collected several billion dollars in payment for order flow and related revenue.
By the numbers
Share of the value in a retail order that reached the customer as price improvement, rather than the broker as payment. Robinhood “explicitly offered to accept less price improvement for its customers … in exchange for receiving a higher rate of payment for order flow for itself.” SEC order, Dec. 17, 2020.
FINRA's fine came to roughly 3.7% of the harm the SEC would go on to measure, and less than 2% of Robinhood's annual payment for order flow revenue at the time. Six months later FINRA published Regulatory Notice 21-23 describing that conduct as a violation. It has never charged anyone with it.
Take action
FINRA has never received a wave of comment letters from individual investors. That is why yours will stand out. We've written a starting point. Edit it, then send it in two taps.
Add a sentence about your own experience as an investor. FINRA hears from member firms constantly and from individual investors almost never, so a personal note is worth more here than anywhere.
Either open a pre-filled email, already addressed to FINRA's Office of the Corporate Secretary with the notice number in the subject, or copy your message into FINRA's official comment form. Both land in the same public file.
FINRA asks that you use only one method, so pick whichever is easier and don't do both. Your comment is then on the record. To go further, see writing your own letter below, or copy the SEC on it.
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Consider copying the SEC. Because the SEC has proposed to rescind Rule 611 on the strength of FINRA's best execution regime, this record belongs in that docket too. Add rule-comments@sec.gov as a cc and put File No. S7-2026-20 in the subject line, or submit separately on the SEC's comment page.
You can read the full notice on FINRA's website, comment directly on FINRA's comment form, or mail a letter to Jennifer Piorko Mitchell, Office of the Corporate Secretary, FINRA, 1700 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20006. Use only one of the three.
Every figure on this page comes from We the Investors' 40-page letter to FINRA, copied to the SEC. It documents the enforcement record case by case, sets out all twelve recommendations in full, and includes a proposed best execution examination module FINRA could adopt as written.
Go deeper
A letter in your own words counts for far more than a form letter. This section is everything you need to write one: how the rule actually works, what FINRA is really asking, what to ask for, and the facts and sources you can cite. You do not need to use all of it. Pick the one or two points you care about most.
The duty. Rule 5310(a)(1) requires a broker to “use reasonable diligence to ascertain the best market for the subject security and buy or sell in such market so that the resultant price to the customer is as favorable as possible under prevailing market conditions.” That is a standard about the price you actually get, and it is enforceable: FINRA holds the order-level data to test any firm's routing against it. The rule has been substantively unchanged since 2012.
The escape hatch. Supplementary Material .09 says a firm that doesn't review orders one at a time may instead run a “regular and rigorous review” of execution quality, at least quarterly, on a security-by-security, type-of-order basis. In practice that means a committee looks at averages every three months instead of anyone looking at your trade.
Where the conflict sits. Payment for order flow appears in the rule text only as one of eight factors a review should “consider.” The actual prohibition, that a firm may not negotiate routing terms that cut into customers' price improvement, exists only in guidance (Regulatory Notice 21-23), not in the rule.
So FINRA charges the paperwork, not the price. Nothing in the rule stops FINRA from charging a broker whose routing demonstrably costs its customers price improvement. It has simply never done it. What it enforces instead is the review requirement, so a firm that convenes a quarterly committee, produces minutes saying it “considered” the eight factors, and then routes every order to the wholesalers that pay it has, on this record, nothing to fear. Your price is never the violation. The paperwork is. That is why all ten cases are paperwork cases, why none measures harm, and why none orders a dollar of restitution.
The Notice asks dozens of questions. These are the ones that would move the rule in the wrong direction, plus two that could move it in the right direction. Answering even a single question by number makes your letter far more useful to FINRA staff.
Why it mattersOrder-by-order review is the only standard under which your actual price is the thing being reviewed. Everything else is a quarterly look at averages. Remove it and the rule stops touching the outcome altogether.
What you can sayOrder-by-order review must stay, and should be extended to all retail orders rather than relaxed. FINRA itself said in 2021 that technology has made it practicable.
Why it mattersThe router is the thing being reviewed. A firm whose own routing software certifies its routing decisions is grading its own exam.
What you can sayA router cannot also be the review. Reject any interpretation that lets routing software substitute for an independent look at the price the customer received.
Why it mattersEvery one of the ten enforcement actions in a decade was a paperwork case. A safe harbor for documentation would convert the loophole into a defense: produce the minutes, keep the payments.
What you can sayNo safe harbor for documentation. If anything, FINRA should publish what a “regular and rigorous” review must actually contain, and enforce against the price rather than the paperwork.
Why it mattersYes, but the standard has to be objective. “97% of orders received price improvement” only means the fill was inside the spread by at least a hundredth of a cent. One mil on a two-cent spread is not best execution; it is a receipt.
What you can saySet a real floor: where a firm takes payment for order flow or internalizes, require the midpoint or better when the spread is one tick, and at least a full tick when it is wider.
Why it mattersThe SEC has proposed to rescind Rule 611 on the theory that FINRA's best execution duty catches whatever falls through. FINRA responds by calling its framework “time-tested” and asking whether to relax it. Each regulator is pointing at the other.
What you can sayFINRA should tell the SEC plainly whether it is prepared to be the only protection on every retail order, and what it will do differently from the last ten years. If the answer is “nothing,” Rule 611 must not be rescinded.
Why it mattersEverything here is worse in options. Roughly 70% of all retail payment for order flow comes from options, and there is no Rule 605 for options, so even the aggregate execution quality data that exist for stocks do not exist at all.
What you can sayYes. Every fix FINRA adopts for equities should apply expressly to listed options, and options need execution quality disclosure of their own.
These are the twelve changes We the Investors asked for. Adopt any of them in your own words, or make your own ask.
Replace the quarterly aggregate standard for retail flow. The review must consider all venues, including ones the firm has no relationship with, and must be quantitative. Institutional orders can keep today's flexibility.
Where a firm takes payment for order flow or internalizes, presume the execution fails best execution unless it gets the midpoint or better on a one-tick spread, and at least a full tick on a wider one. Canada has done this since 2012.
Wholesalers should have to publish execution quality for each broker whose orders they handle. Broker-level discrimination is invisible in today's aggregate data, and stays that way until the data are broken out.
A firm can engineer a bad result at a venue it wants to avoid. Reviews must document the routing parameters used at each venue, or they are just grading a test the firm wrote.
FINRA should state that a routing firm may never rely on the receiving firm's review where that firm pays for the orders or executes them as principal. You cannot outsource a duty of loyalty to the other side of the conflict.
FINRA says it has observed firms burying “not held” language in new account agreements. It should say that this violates Rule 5310, and then charge it.
Examiners should be able to inspect the order routing audit trail directly and periodically, not only on request. And FINRA should publish, annually, its Rule 5310 exam, referral, enforcement and restitution counts.
FINRA has never published what a “regular and rigorous” review must contain, which is why every review is different and every case is a bespoke argument about adequacy.
FINRA has the SEC's Robinhood order, a wholesaler CEO's own on-camera account, nine years of its own exam findings, and the order-level data nobody else has. The theory has been on the books since June 2021. Use it.
Collect the same handful of execution quality numbers from every firm quarterly, then compare brokers at the same wholesaler, in the same stock, at the same moment. The Consolidated Audit Trail identifies the routing broker, so FINRA can do on every order what one academic study did with 85,000. Examine the firms at the bottom on execution and the top on payment received; refer the repeat offenders.
Governors and committee members whose firms pay, receive, or internalize retail order flow should recuse from best execution matters, and each recusal should be published. Nobody should hold a seat while employed by a firm that has been the subject of an enforcement action in the past decade.
Every firm should name a registered principal personally responsible for best execution oversight, certifying annually and after any material routing change. Ten years of process cases produced ten fines paid by firms and no consequence for any individual.
Length is not the point. A clear page beats a vague ten. FINRA's comment files are almost entirely industry submissions, so a few honest paragraphs from an individual investor stand out. Don't let anything stop you.
Ammunition
Everything here is on the public record. Quote any of it; the source line is what makes it credible.
Questions
FINRA is the self-regulatory organization that writes and enforces the rules your broker operates under, overseen by the SEC. Best execution, the duty to get you the best price reasonably available, lives in FINRA's rulebook as Rule 5310, not in any SEC rule. FINRA is the only regulator with that rule, the order-level data, and the authority to act on it. That's why this letter goes to FINRA.
Yes, and here more than usual. FINRA's comment files are almost entirely industry submissions: firms, trade associations, and their counsel. Individual investors rarely write in at all. A visible file of investor letters would be something new in this process, and it becomes part of the public record the SEC sees when it decides whether to rescind Rule 611 on the strength of FINRA's best execution regime.
No. A few honest sentences about why the price you get on your trades matters to you carry more weight than a polished form letter. Use the draft above as a starting point, or pick a single point from the sections above and write about that one thing.
Yes. FINRA posts comments on its website, including any personal details you include. Share only what you're comfortable making public. Your name is optional.
They're two halves of the same fight. The SEC proposed to rescind Rule 611, the rule that mechanically guarantees you the best displayed price, on the theory that a broker's best execution duty covers what's lost. This campaign is about that duty: whether FINRA is willing and able to enforce it. If Rule 5310 is going to be the only protection left, its enforcement record has to be part of the SEC's record too. So we suggest copying the SEC on your letter.
About two minutes with the draft above. Fifteen or twenty if you want to write your own using the guide, and that version is worth more.
Comments are due September 25, 2026. Earlier is better; don't wait for the last day.
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