It's difficult to win in an SEC governed market that is corrupt by design. You'd need a competitive advantage large enough to bridge the SECs designed corruption in the market.
Read through Tesla’s history with the SEC, specifically Musk being immature and committing securities fraud on Twitter. They’ve fined him and the company, and there is no love lost between the two, but TSLA is still going up.
The twitter outrage over elon's comments are nothing more than a woefully uninformed public hoping to remove the tip without addressing the iceburg underneath.
If every one of your competition doesn't have to play by the rules, you'll find it hard to beat them playing honestly and you'll find that over time the only winners left are the cheaters.
- flow internalization which reduces liquidity on venues and widens spreads
- dark pools which is liquidity only available to institutions, therefore removing liquidity from venues that retail trades on
- market fragmentation which harms retail investors who don't have the execution sophistication of HFT or execution algos
- short sale restriction which harms retail traders who incur excess slippage
- allowing market makers to naked short sell but not retail investors which harms retail investors because they have to pay rents to access it
- trading halts which benefit institutions (over retail) who have the execution sophistication to handle unhalts and who can price warrants etc better while the product is halted