Per-user revenue was $109 for 2020. My goodness payment for order flow and cryptocurrency rebates are lucrative.
(Of course, that gets rid of the "market segmentation" signals, so it'd probably make life a little better for institutions and make life a little worse for individuals, on net. No doubt smart people could disagree about how much of each effect there would be.)
Exactly, retail investors should basically be happy with PFOF.
I think the order flow model is better for most retail traders. Obviously, if you're buying $20k in stock at a time, paying the fees will be better, but that's not your average Robinhood user.
Put another way, Robinhood’s actual customers are confident that they are able to extract in excess of $109 in value each year they purchase the flow of orders from a given Robinhood user. From where and/or from whom do you suppose this money is being extracted?
My guess is from other funds that aren't privy to what horse the lemmings are betting on today and riding that wave.
Adverse selection is scary and knowing your counterparty is worth a lot. This is not as sinister as you're making it out to be.
How do we reconcile this with the narrative that they’re the good guys delivering wealth generation through investing to the masses?
My only point is that the narrative of Robinhood is completely backwards. Far from the “stealing from the rich to give to the poor” backstory from which the name comes from, all they’ve done is encourage hordes of unsuspecting sheep to venture deep into the wolves’ den.
PFOF may not be evil, but Robinhood certainly is. The fact that their customers’ orders are of such high value makes it abundantly clear who the moneyed players think losers at the table are. Anyone paying attention understands that Robinhood’s product is a continuous flow of suckers to their paying customers. Trading on Robinhood is an implicit bet with apparently quite poor odds that you’re not one of those suckers.
That doesn’t mean you’re better off trading on some other platform. It means they're goading you into playing the wrong game in which entities with billions at stake are so convinced you will lose they’re happy to pay for the privilege of sitting down at the table with you. The real lesson is that you should be playing a different game than the one Robinhood is promoting.
It's essentially a "first dibs" approach to fulfilling a transaction. By law it's required to fill at the best price available, so there's no difference in price, and it may even fill quicker if it's in between the bid/asks because of the reason explained above.
etc
They must execute client orders at a price as good as or better than the national best bid offer, if I understand correctly (Reg NMS [1]). Now, the firms that buy that order flow offer better (tighter) prices, an improvement over the NBBO, and what Robinhood does is take a cut of that improvement.
(Robinhood takes a larger cut than other brokers, fair enough, but those other brokers used to charge an additional flat fee. So, for small orders, you're better off with Robinhood, for large orders you're better off with a different broker. Note that this was the behaviour that triggered regulatory action a while ago, and the situation might look different now, given that other brokers also offer trades without commission. Either way, you should get executed at NBBO or better.)
I did an A/B test of this, and found that RH was actually an outlier in terms of how bad your executions are.
> By March 2019, Robinhood had conducted a more extensive internal analysis, which showed that its execution quality and price improvement metrics were substantially worse than other retail broker-dealers in many respects, including the percentage of orders that received price improvement and the amount of price improvement, measured on a per order, per share, and per dollar traded basis.
But again, it's a relative issue. For small trades, overall you got a better deal than paying a slightly better price plus a fixed commission. For large trades, nope. So, at Robinhood the rich big traders subsidised the smaller ones. Kind of fitting for the name.
> For most orders of more than 100 shares, the analysis concluded that Robinhood customers would be better off trading at another broker-dealer because the additional price improvement that such orders would receive at other broker-dealers would likely exceed the approximately $5 per-order commission costs that those broker-dealers were then charging.
All in all, I think their model is defensible, but lying about it isn't.
ETA: To be clear, I think their pricing and revenue model is defensible. But: a 10$ fee for a long term trade is also pretty negligible. What Robinhood have democratised is day trading and gambling, and that's not good.
[1] scroll down to "Robinhood (1)": https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-07/the-ip...
why is it not good? I think as long as the person doing the trading understands the consequences of their actions, they should be allowed to make that trade. If you could prove that people are being defrauded into thinking trading is risk free, then the problem isn't with robinhood but with education and awareness, and that issue must be solved at a societal level, rather than placing all responsibility onto the company providing a utility.