This is the official press release regarding the closing down of Timber Hill:
https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=24473
In it, it states "Today retail order-flow is purchased by large order internalizers and joining them would represent a conflict we do not wish to have." I would take "conflict" as "conflict of interest".
In the Wikipedia page of Interactive Brokers,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Brokers, it is further states "In 2001, the corporate name of the Timber Hill Group LLC was changed to Interactive Brokers Group LLC, which at the time handled 200,000 trades per day. In 2002, Interactive Brokers, along with the
Bourse de Montréal and the
Boston Stock Exchange, created the
Boston Options Exchange.". And actually until its current day, "Interactive Brokers Group owns 40 percent of the futures exchange
OneChicago, and is an equity partner and founder of the
Boston Options Exchange." so in essence IB still owns that options exchange in a way.
So I am not wrong in saying Timber Hill was closed down due to conflict of interest and it's an exchange not just a market maker.
Do your own research and know your own company better before you want to do any PR to spin some factual statements people made.
If this is true we should see an improvement in rebates/fills after Timber Hill closed. Is that what you are seeing?
I wasn't going to say the following but since you decided to spin further out of something that wasn't even said, I have no choice but to say the following:
How do you win against people who can see every single trade you made at exactly the price? The very fact that IB couldn't make money with Timber Hill because it didn't have access to order flow then exactly illustrates the fact we don't know how much more potential profit that we retail traders are losing right now to brokers that use PFO and use exclusively PFO like Robinhood. The argument that we get better execution and/or better price is just BS. And this has already been proven many times in retail Forex where there is no central exchanges at all and the broker you trade with is the market maker that takes the other side of your transaction, you win only at the expense of the broker losing then WHY would the broker let you win while it loses all the time? What's the point of getting a better price and/or faster execution when the dealer can just "work it" later to take you out of the game? Remember with PFO, we the retail traders have zero access to the central exchanges. The central exchanges are exclusively for the dealers or the market makers who have paid the brokers to execute your orders so they basically are the opposite side of your transaction. It's as if there is no central exchanges just like the retail Forex with PFO.
And I am glad that IB has now finally admitted that they do play the "add/remove liquidity" game as I and many others have observed many times with how IB manipulated order routing to turn my and I am sure numerous others' liquidity-adding orders to liquidity-removing orders just to rob us the rebate fees. Disclosing it in a 606 statement is just window dressing to satisfy the useless "compliance" requirement. It's like a thief confessing to the theft after-the-fact "yup yup yup I did it" just so it can get away with jail. How about just not doing it? Or compensating traders for the rebate fees that they were supposed to get?