If you are an avid follower of news on the social media platform Twitter, chances are you might have read about GameStop and how a group of Redditors took on Wall Street hedge fund billionaires. It all started when a Reddit user found Melvin Capital, a hedge fund company was shorting the GameStop stocks. An analogy would be if a person x wants to buy 5 bananas which are being sold at INR 10 in the market, and another person y already purchased 5 bananas. X could borrow y’s bananas for a while and sell them with the hope the price will go down below INR 10. Then x will purchase 5 bananas for a lesser price than INR 10 and give back the bananas to y thereby making a profit, in the difference of buying price. A group of Redditers noticed what hedge funds were doing with GameStop stock and decided to buy all the available shares in the market which in turn led to stock value soaring through the roof. Now imagine the bananas as GameStop stock and x is the hedge fund. Now hedge funds have to return the borrowed shares but since they already sold, they had to buy it for a larger price than they hoped. This in turn led to more than $ 5 billion in losses for hedge funds because they were shorting the GameStop stock.
However, Robinhood, the zero commission investment and trading startup found itself in the midst of the storm. This is because thousands of normal small investors wanted to purchase the GameStop stock and they did it via Robinhood. Wall Street was not happy with the way a group of Redditors held hedge funds by their collars and lobbied to have the stocks delisted.
Mounting pressure from the Government and Wall Street forced Robinhood to delist GameStop, AMC and Nokia stocks from their trading roster which in turn led to huge customer backlash and lakhs of 1 star reviews on app stores of Apple and Android.
Background
Robinhood was founded by Stanford University graduates Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev co-founded the company in 2013, with the aim of democratizing finance and making it more accessible to young and less affluent investors. This was due to trading being carried on commission based platforms like ETrade and TD Ameritrade and by a very small set of people. What made the app so attractive to the normal public was the ease of using the platform and its zero commission slogan. More importantly, Robinhood made the appeal of trading fun and interactive for the general public and the working class. Investment applications normally charge a nominal fee or commission on the execution of any successful trade.
However, the app gained huge traction in 2019 just when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. Stock markets crashed suddenly, wiping out billions of dollars in investor wealth. However, this phase saw the rise of a new kind of investor. Americans were given $ 1200 stimulus cheques to protect them from the economic fallout of COVID-19 pandemic. Armed with these cheques, millions of trading novices began investing in the stock market via Robinhood.
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Revenue model
How does a startup which calls itself a zero commission brokerage earn revenue and manage to be profitable? Robinhood was designed to make profits by selling the customer trading data to several investment firms on Wall Street. This practice is known as high volume order flow. In financial markets, payment for order flow refers to the compensation that a broker receives, not from its client, but from a third party that wants to influence how the broker routes client orders for fulfillment. It is not illegal but it is often frowned upon, to use this strategy as it is also called a ‘kickback.’ This accounts for a lion’s share of revenue for Robinhood.
The second revenue generator is through interests. Robinhood makes money from interest made by lending out investor’s idle cash. Robinhood lends out uninvested cash sitting idle in customer accounts.
The third revenue generator is Robinhood Gold, the company’s premium account, allows investors up to $1000 of margin thereby allowing them to trade with more than they have in their cash balance on the app.
While Robinhood has been caught in the middle of a nasty war between Wall Street and retail investors, there is no denying the fact that it changed the way people invest in the stock market.
