The Silicon Valley Start-Up That Caused Wall Street Chaos

January 30, 2021
Business

Robinhood’s marketing, meanwhile, papered over the fact that its business model, and the free trading, were paid for by selling customer’s orders to Wall Street firms in a system known as “payment for order flow.” Big trading firms like Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial give Robinhood a small fee each time they buy or sell for its customers, typically a fraction of a penny per share. These trading firms make money, in turn, by pocketing the difference, known as the “spread,” between the buy and sell price on any given stock trade, and the more trades they handle, the greater their potential revenue. Many other online brokers rely on a similar system, but Robinhood has negotiated to collect significantly more for each trade than other online brokers, The Times has found.

The mismatch between Robinhood’s marketing and the underlying mechanics led to a $65 million fine from the S.E.C. last month. The agency said that Robinhood had misled customers about how it was paid by Wall Street firms for passing along customer trades.

Robinhood has also run afoul of regulators as it rushed to release new products. In December 2018, the company said it would offer a checking and savings account that would be insured by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, or S.I.P.C., which protects investors when a brokerage firm fails.

But S.I.P.C.’s then-chief executive said he hadn’t heard about Robinhood’s plan, and he pointed out that the S.I.P.C. doesn’t protect plain-vanilla savings accounts — that would be the job of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It took almost a year for Robinhood to reintroduce the product, saying in a blog post that it “made mistakes” with its earlier announcement.

“They went in trying to make big splashes and they often had to get reeled back in,” said Scott Smith, a brokerage analyst at the financial firm Cerulli Associates.