Schwab Faces Antitrust Suit to Unwind TD Ameritrade Merger (1)

Retail investors hit Charles Schwab Corp. with federal antitrust claims in Texas on Thursday, seeking to unwind its merger with TD Ameritrade over claims that the $26 billion deal slashed rebates and discounts for traders by drastically reducing competition among brokerages.

The lawsuit accuses Schwab of capturing half of the market for “retail order flow"—trading data that powers the industry by serving as the feedstock for “supercharged” machine learning models—through a transaction that significantly worsened concentration of an already tight-knit financial sector.

By curtailing competition among retail brokerages that sell their data to the upstream market makers driving the artificial ...