[cs702]

The main point of this article is that Robinhood has brought Silicon Valley-style maximization of user engagement to retail stock-market trading without regard for the psychological, social, and financial consequences to the people who use the service.

The author claims that for Robinhood, "maximizing user engagement" translates into blindly optimizing for getting more and more individuals to trade more and more. Those individuals are not paying for the product; they are the product. More precisely, they are the raw material for generating as much order flow as possible for sale to Wall Street firms.

Robinhood, in other words, is in the business of MANUFACTURING as much order flow as possible from its raw material, retail investors.

This is probably Not a Good Thing™ for retail investors.

[rchaud]

At this point, I'm inclined to think that the only benefit VC-funded companies provide to the consumer is by subsidizing the price of the service. Uber, WeWork, DoorDash etc are all piling up losses by undercutting competitors to gain market share. That cannot last. At some point, the other shoe will drop.

Be ready to jump ship if the benefits no longer exceed the costs (lock-in, bad business practices, sale of personal information), etc.

[vinay427]

I find this characterization somewhat amusing, in a positive way. This makes it sound like someone implemented (rather poorly) an ambitious wealth gap reduction plan that uses insufficient approximations and no government oversight, leaving a significant number of people behind.

[jmalicki]

Is this a wealth gap reduction scheme? After all, the ultimate investors (outside of sovereign wealth funds at least) are usually pension funds, which tend to be pretty middle class. The beneficiaries of VC here are usually the upper middle class for both actual employees of these firms, and a lot of the beneficiaries of Uber, AirBNB, etc.

This could be wrong, but I think the direction of wealth transfer is worth considering - is this wealth redistribution, or is it the rich and powerful looting the middle class?

[aka1234]

This is why I've always felt Robinhood is evil.

It is trading platform that combines 1.) user engagement/gamification with 2.) targeting a core userbase of young adults that are both financially unstable and inexperienced. It's disgusting and immoral.

This is the epitome of late-stage capitalism. Extract as much money as possible from gullible users. Except we're not maximizing screentime anymore to leverage ad revenue and micro transactions. We're maximizing screen time to drive trade volume while letting people make financial decisions that can literally ruin the rest of their lives.

Well, at least Robinhood's platform hasn't directly led to young adults committing suicide. Oh, it has? Nevermind...