[codingdave]

I don't see it truly changing how investing works. After all, the recent events are not all that different than what we saw during the original dotcom boom, where people would talk on Yahoo boards about their favorite stocks, and you'd get accidental retail pump & dumps just like we've seen recently. This is not a new pattern, it is just a new generation going through it.

What I do see changing is pricing. Robinhood proved that it is a viable business model for brokers to monetize interest on non-invested balances instead of charging per trade. The pricing will definitely go down in the future, and there may be more experimentation with other pricing models.

[reducesuffering]

Robinhood hardly, if at all, monetizes interest on non-invested balances anymore. Their cash-management feature sweeps any uninvested funds into FDIC insuranced accounts with partner banks, earning typical Savings accounts interest rates: 2% before Covid, and currently 0.30%.

Venmo, PayPal, and CashApp are the ones monetizing interest on their clients' funds, essentially acting as a checking account paying 0% interest.