The debate has pulled in retail brokers, exchanges, market makers<\/a>, Wall Street trade groups, and firms eyeing tokenized stocks.<\/p>\n The SEC says the rule applies to hundreds of trading centers, from public stock exchanges to firms that execute trades away from those exchanges.<\/p>\n In plain English, Rule 611 is a best-price guardrail. If one trading venue is showing the best public price to buy or sell a stock, another venue generally cannot ignore that quote and execute at a worse price somewhere else.<\/p>\n That best public price is known as the national best bid and offer<\/a>, or NBBO. Think of it as the market’s public scoreboard for the best price to buy and the best price to sell.<\/p>\n Robinhood’s case is modernization. The company argues the rule is outdated, adds complexity, and has helped spread trading across too many places. It says brokers would still have a duty to seek best execution<\/a> for customers even without Rule 611.<\/p>\n That is the argument for change. The modern stock market is already a web of public exchanges, private trading systems, market-making firms, and off-exchange trading.<\/p>\n SEC Rule 611 applies across hundreds of trading centers in a market split across exchanges, private venues, and off-exchange firms.<\/p>\n Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading, sees the same sprawl and reaches the opposite conclusion.<\/p>\n “If you’re the best bid or the best offer, your price needed to be traded with before they can go to a different price,” Saluzzi told Yahoo Finance at the June ETP Forum hosted by ETFGlobal. “So it protects the best bids and offers.”<\/p>\n His concern is that replacing a bright-line rule with a broader best-execution standard could weaken the public quote investors rely on.<\/p>\n Saluzzi offered a simple example: Say the highest public offer to buy a stock is $10, while the lowest public offer to sell is $10.05. The $0.05 gap is the spread. If a retail investor offers to buy at $10.01, that investor is now showing the best bid.<\/p>\n Without Rule 611, Saluzzi said, “Your best bid could now get traded through.”<\/p>\n There is also a newer wrinkle. Saluzzi argues that the rule matters even more as regulators explore ways for tokenized stocks and other stock-like products<\/a> to trade outside traditional market plumbing. A tokenized stock may track Apple (AAPL<\/a>) or Nvidia (NVDA<\/a>), but it is not the same as trading the company’s registered shares.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robinhood is backing a push to scrap SEC Rule 611, a little-known rule meant to stop the market…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":716539,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28,308765,308766,38135,7702,308767,42077,162066,1169,103429],"class_list":["post-716538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-public-exchanges","tag-public-price","tag-robinhood","tag-sec","tag-sec-rule","tag-securities-and-exchange-commission","tag-stock-exchanges","tag-stock-market","tag-stock-price"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=716538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/716539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=716538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=716538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=716538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Public](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/exch-vs-off_3703.png\")
Public exchanges include venues like NYSE, Nasdaq, Cboe, and other registered exchanges. Off-exchange trades happen away from those public venues, then get reported after the fact. \u00b7 Cboe <\/p>\n SEC Rule 611 applies across hundreds of trading centers in a market split across exchanges, private venues, and off-exchange firms. \u00b7 Securities and Exchange Commission <\/p>\n