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Extremely-Bad-Idea t1_iu9t5z9 wrote

I am unaware of any volume requirements that the NYSE or NASDAQ are required to maintain as part of their SEC licensing. Obviously they are huge and process billions of shares in trade every business day.

Regarding individual market makers, I believe that any SEC licensed brokerage can be a market maker for one or more stocks. Big brokerages, such as Fidelity and Schwab, can easily make internal matches between buyers and sellers for heavily traded stocks like Microsoft, Exxon, and Macy's. However, they may need to still need to divert some orders to exchanges when they can't match them immediately.

For thinly traded stocks, such a small caps, the exchanges are very important. Even big brokerages typically cannot be market makers for those.

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