The market makers you see on Level 2 are simply buying and selling for the brokers that they represent. The brokers represent individual traders. The individual traders put in their buy & sell orders to the broker, the broker transmits that info to the market maker and the market maker completes the transaction. There's a lot of talk on message boards about market maker manipulation like it's some devious entity but they are just filling orders for the broker. I believe it's all electronic now so whether the market makers are buying and selling for themselves to manipulate for a profit, I'm really not sure if that happens or not.
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