When you strip the noise away, the real question is simple: dark pools solve one problem — information leakage — but create another: uncertain fill quality. Three quick checks before you act: 1. Name the mechanism in plain English: Routing orders to dark venues can reduce market impact, but you sacrifice price transparency and cannot be sure of the counterparty mix. 2. Say why it matters for behavior or portfolio decisions: That trade-off means dark routing is useful for large institutional flows but often irrelevant or harmful for retail-sized orders. 3. Set the review question: Write down the state variable you would monitor first if this thesis started to drift. Market translation: A pension fund selling $50M of a mid-cap position genuinely benefits from dark pool midpoint execution. A retail trader selling 100 shares does not. Failure mode: The mistake is assuming all dark routing is beneficial without understanding who is on the other side of the fill. A lot of confusion disappears once you separate the headline from the mechanism.