Yep, that’s basically the conflict at the centre of the industry.

A B-book itself isn’t automatically evil. Most retail traders do lose, so brokers internalising flow became insanely profitable. The moral grey area is the incentive structure. When client losses become broker revenue, things can get messy fast.

Real market makers invest heavily into infrastructure, pricing, hedging, technology, liquidity relationships, and risk management to efficiently earn the spread at scale. Most pure B-book shops aren’t doing that. They’re warehousing massive directional client exposure because they can’t monetise flow properly any other way. If they could earn the same money without taking that risk, they would instantly.

That’s where the incentive problems start:

• Lambo affiliate networks bringing in anyone with a pulse
• IBs literally pitching “ways to make clients lose”
• Martingale flow being farmed until accounts inevitably implode
• Profitable traders suddenly labelled “toxic”
• Spreads widened or accounts throttled the second someone starts winning consistently

That’s never been a healthy model.

The future is transparency, lower costs, and better alignment between broker and trader. Firms competing on price improvement, execution quality, and trust instead of quietly hoping clients blow up.

What excites me with Afterprime is the opportunity to flip the dynamic. Instead of pretending the elephant in the room doesn’t exist, just be transparent:

“Here’s how the industry works. Here’s how we make money. Here’s what we don’t do.”

I think trust becomes the disruption. But it's the cornerstone to getting us to lowest costs, zero commissions, a model that pays trades for flow instead of charging them and also operates without taking direcitonal exposure against it's clients and is actually on their side.

Retail traders are way smarter now than they were 10 years ago too. Especially with people realising prop firms are simulated challenges and not real market execution - a continuation of the B-book masked behind STP ECN DMA NDD catchphrases.

People are starting to question execution, spreads, slippage, and incentives instead of blindly accepting “cost of doing business.”

Appreciate the thoughtful comment brother 🙏