Somehow I feel that all these VC backed firms just add employees for the sake of adding employees.
I use Tastyworks - another free online brokerage that it almost at feature parity with Robinhood. They have stocks, options, futures and even some selective crypto. They also make money using PFOF just like Robinhood.
However on Linkedin, their employee count is less than 100 (99 to be precise) On the other hand, Robinhood was at almost 4000 employees at the start of the year. I think they still have about 80% more employees than where they need to be.
Tastyworks was founded by the founders, CTO, and CFO of Thinkorswim. I worked on thinkorswim institutional desk for several years back in the mid-2000s. Not great brand recognition but a company built for traders by traders.
Very few people use RH as 'investing'. Those will be on boring brokers like Vanguard.
I have a Tastyworks account too - the fills are way better than Robinhood's. As expected, since they charge some amount per trade. But that means that the "free" platform will definitely have more users, just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in the fills, and get frontrunning trades)
>just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in the fills, and get frontrunning trades)
Can you provide a source for this? Citadel (one of the companies robinhood sells order flow to) claims in regulatory filings[1] that the overwhelming majority of orders are executed at market price or better, and that they on average save traders money.
Because they are paying for a supply of (on average) uneducated morons with no edge. Can you imagine how much a professional poker player would pay to be in a tournament with amateurs?
tl;dr: adverse selection. retail traders are less risky to deal with, so market makers can offer better prices to them.
>If the retail trades are random. If retail traders usually buy before the stock goes up, and sell before the stock goes down, the wholesaler would consistently lose money on price risk. (This is called “adverse selection.”) But they don’t. Even now, retail traders tend to be small, dispersed and uninformed. If you sell stock to a retail trader for $58.15, you have no particular reason to think it will go up (or down). The retail traders are trading randomly, which is what allows you to treat this problem as though you were matching them up with each other at a fixed price and collecting a spread. In reality you are matching them up with each other over time, not simultaneously, and the price moves while you are doing it, but the randomness of their trading means that this difference doesn’t matter too much.
>Meanwhile market makers on the public exchange are doing something similar, but with institutional traders who tend to be informed and trade large lots of stock, so their trading does carry a lot more risk of adverse selection. If a big institution buys some stock, that does mean the stock is somewhat more likely to go up, so if you sell them the stock you are somewhat more likely to lose money. This is why the spread on the public exchange—the difference between the $58 best bid to buy the stock and the $58.25 best offer to sell the stock—is so much wider than the 5 cents that the wholesaler charges. The wholesaler is just matching up small pleasant random orders and clipping a spread; the stock-exchange market maker is facing a real risk of being run over by an informed trader.
The numbers are given as examples, not as real figures. If you look at the document from my prior comment the price improvement (and therefore spreads that citadel makes) is on the order of pennies or less.
I don't know the situation now, but both used to sell their order flow to the same place. I used both and fills for pretty much the same. However, I used tasty platform to set up options and then execute them on RH most of the time.
If you are seeing a venue not meeting nbbo you have a whistleblower suit to make which have been quite lucrative.
When I was doing this for work the issues we ran into came down to a) making the orders hit the tape close enough to ensure similar priority b) the size of the orders changing execution depending on venue c) differences in performance per symbol.
This was in a place that was sending a fair amount of orders in. Even then given the above finding statistical relevance was hard.
I used to work at a real time brokerage + national bank based out of the Midwest. The entire engineering+ operations team was 128 people, exactly. Including the CIO and his assistant who ruled the 39th floor with an iron fist, a hold over from the dot com era. They're publicly traded. I think they're down to 90 people but still running a functional company with tens of thousands of broker dealers. I have no idea how you need more than 500 tech people to run an online trading platform.
AFAIK, it's just representative of status/power, but I don't know its origins.
A listing in The Urban Dictionary defines/describes it as: When an idea, movement or act has become very successful. To be propelled to great heights. [1]
FWIW, there's a band called The 39th Floor [2] that I like for its grungy/retro-ish rock. The band's name evokes, for me, the image of "high-powered execs", but I'm not sure how that association got into my head. (Possibly the track Koka Kola on The Clash's album London Calling [3], but that refers to a "51st floor", rather than 39th, to symbolise corporate success/power [4].)
No that's just the particular floor we happened to be on. I think the bank was on 38 and the trading floor was... 32?, executive suite was 41 or something. We had like five or six floors in the upper third of the 42 story building and a bank branch down in the lobby. They probably would have liked to have contiguous floors but it would have been a lot of work to move the data center and trading floor just to say you had X floors in a row.
… and competition comes screaming into their short-lived dominance and leaves them reeling with a mountain of debt and no profits. Barriers to entry are quite small for tech companies, so it always amazes me when analysts and dreamy investors rave about how their favorite “unicorn” tech company will dominate or is “disruptive”. Their disruption and dominance is likely to be short.
You are actually a bit closer to the truth than most. The goal of a CEO is to generate as much hype early on as possible in order to spur growth. They spend early capital on growing employee count to generate even more hype. This raises their own net worth significantly. When the company goes public, they will dump what they are allowed to, navigate the much more "public" waters for a bit, then walk away with a small fortune. It becomes a game of investor bag holding at some point. The C-Suite is almost never left holding the bags. It is always the investor. I'm not sympathizing with investors, mind you.
I use Tastyworks - another free online brokerage that it almost at feature parity with Robinhood. They have stocks, options, futures and even some selective crypto. They also make money using PFOF just like Robinhood.
However on Linkedin, their employee count is less than 100 (99 to be precise) On the other hand, Robinhood was at almost 4000 employees at the start of the year. I think they still have about 80% more employees than where they need to be.