Ten Minutes and Nine Words: The Interrogation That Reveals What Your Broker Really Wants

Every brokerage website in America looks identical: clean typography, a bull market chart, the word "empower" somewhere in the hero section. None of it tells you how the firm makes money when you are not paying commissions — and that answer, more than any fee table, determines whether the broker's incentives align with yours.

At ExBroker Group, our editorial stance is that retail investors should evaluate a broker the way an institutional due-diligence team would: with direct questions and an ear for evasion. The five questions below take under ten minutes to ask and are structured so that vague answers are themselves informative.

Question One: "How do you route my orders, and do any affiliates participate?"

Order routing is where execution quality is decided. Some brokers send retail orders to market makers — often affiliated entities — in exchange for payment for order flow, a practice we have examined in detail previously. Others offer direct market access or price improvement programs.

What you want: a specific, documented answer naming the routing venues, any affiliated market makers, and the published execution quality statistics (Rule 605 reports) you can review yourself. What should concern you: "we route for best execution" with no supporting detail. Best execution claimed but never measured is a slogan, not a policy.

Question Two: "What do you earn on my idle cash?"

Uninvested cash balances are among the most profitable assets a broker holds. The broker sweeps client cash into banks or money market vehicles and keeps most of the yield. Ask what rate you receive versus the prevailing risk-free rate, and whether a higher rate requires a paid subscription tier. A spread of two or three percentage points on your cash balance is a quiet annual fee that never appears on a statement.

Question Three: "Besides commissions, what are your revenue sources?"

This question forces the full disclosure the marketing page omits. Revenue streams can include payment for order flow, securities lending (where your fully paid shares are lent out and the broker keeps the proceeds), interest on margin, cash sweeps, affiliate product referrals, and data monetization. A broker that answers this plainly is telling you something important about its culture. A broker that answers with a link to a 60-page disclosure document is telling you something too.

Question Four: "If I hold fractional shares, what happens when I transfer out?"

As discussed in our recent coverage of fractional mechanics, transferability is a blind spot. Ask specifically: do fractional positions transfer via ACATS, get liquidated, or strand at the outgoing firm? Who bears any tax consequence of liquidation? The answer reveals how the firm treats portability — a proxy for how it treats customers generally.

Question Five: "What happened the last time your platform went down?"

Every platform fails eventually. What matters is the post-mortem. Ask about the most recent major outage: duration, affected order types, compensation for customers harmed by missed executions, and what infrastructure changed afterward. A broker with a documented incident history and concrete remediation is more trustworthy than one claiming it has never had a problem. It has. Everyone has.

Reading the Answers

Judge responses on three axes: specificity (numbers and named entities beat adjectives), proactivity (disclosure offered unprompted beats disclosure extracted), and documentation (claims you can verify in Rule 605 data, fee schedules, and written policy beat verbal assurances).

No broker will score perfectly on all five questions. The goal is not purity — it is visibility. An investor who knows exactly how a broker profits from the relationship can price that conflict into their decisions. An investor who does not know is not avoiding the conflict; they are simply paying for it blind. In precision markets, the questions you ask before opening an account are the cheapest risk management you will ever buy.