If you're buy-side you know you're a clown on the execution side - it's not your core competency, it's just a cost center that you vaguely want to keep as low as possible while you make your real money through long-term value investing or serving your fundamentals-trading clients. You'd rather trade in the pool full of clowns, where the sharks get kicked out, and execution will be basically a wash rather than a transfer of money from you to the HFTs whose core competency is execution.
Yes, you would rather trade in the clown pool. But isn't the problem that the sell-side doesn't just fleece the clowns, but also enables the clowns to trade at the rate they expect to trade at?
Well yeah. My point is simply that if Barclays had really managed to achieve what the chart appears to show without compromising execution rate (probably impossible), their clients would have been happy rather than insulted.
