You are literally required to get better fill prices than the market with PFOF. You aren't being played any more than if you just send a normal limit order to the market
Why—exactly—do you reason that someone is willing to pay $109 per user per year for their order flow?
Put another way, Robinhood’s actual customers are confident that they are able to extract in excess of $109 in value each year they purchase the flow of orders from a given Robinhood user. From where and/or from whom do you suppose this money is being extracted?
Robinhood users are unsophisticated (= to put it another way: "idiots" who don't have advanced data to inform their trades). This means taking the other side of their transactions is more likely to be profitable than taking the other side of orders coming from, for example, RenTech. Knowing that an order comes from RH (or in other words, not from sophisticated traders) means it's more likely to be profitable for the market maker to fill it. This difference in EV is worth more than $109 to the customers.
It's essentially a "first dibs" approach to fulfilling a transaction. By law it's required to fill at the best price available, so there's no difference in price, and it may even fill quicker if it's in between the bid/asks because of the reason explained above.
a lot of people have given very thorough explanations of why pfof is not an evil thing in this thread. i suppose you're free to believe your own narrative, if you want.
There may be opportunity to build a Robin Hood competitor by transparently passing the PFOF fees through to users, rather than pocketing them (as Robin Hood does). Imagine if you paid a monthly $5 subscription to be a member of a broker, and then had unlimited free executions, with the PFOF fees being clearly shown, and credited to your account.
I understand that Robinhood sells order flow and that you may get a worse fill because of it, but is the average Robinhood user getting 3 cents of slippage on their order of 1 share of Ford worse than a $10 round trip in order fees from a more premium broker on the same trade?
I think the order flow model is better for most retail traders. Obviously, if you're buying $20k in stock at a time, paying the fees will be better, but that's not your average Robinhood user.
The higher-level argument might be that if PFOF didn't exist, NBBO might be better. If Citadel et al wanted to make markets they'd have to publish their prices.
(Of course, that gets rid of the "market segmentation" signals, so it'd probably make life a little better for institutions and make life a little worse for individuals, on net. No doubt smart people could disagree about how much of each effect there would be.)
Though, to be fair, Robinhood offers reasonably spreads.
They must execute client orders at a price as good as or better than the national best bid offer, if I understand correctly (Reg NMS [1]). Now, the firms that buy that order flow offer better (tighter) prices, an improvement over the NBBO, and what Robinhood does is take a cut of that improvement.
(Robinhood takes a larger cut than other brokers, fair enough, but those other brokers used to charge an additional flat fee. So, for small orders, you're better off with Robinhood, for large orders you're better off with a different broker. Note that this was the behaviour that triggered regulatory action a while ago, and the situation might look different now, given that other brokers also offer trades without commission. Either way, you should get executed at NBBO or better.)
Robinhood's spreads are much larger than many other brokerages because of the deals they make with order flow buyers. Yes, they are still at or better than NBBO, but many brokerages will give you price improvement on crossing orders down to near the midpoint price (unless you are very good at timing the market and already have a great price from crossing).
I did an A/B test of this, and found that RH was actually an outlier in terms of how bad your executions are.
I always had that little voice in the back of my head, that told me that RH and all the others are just feeding small investors' money to the big ones. I never really figuered out how, selling their order low at worse spreads than others explains a lot of my doubts, so. It also means that I will stay away from those brokers as far as possile. Well, not that I'm a potential client anyway, the only trading I do is with RSU and ESOPs I received over my career using whatever brokerage came with these packages. And then only to sell some from time to time, like once every other year if a all. If I want to gamble, I take ten bucks to the nearest casino's roullette table and have fun or an hour or so.
Matt Levine has some insight on this [1]. And you're right, Robinhood's price improvement was bad compared to standard brokers:
> By March 2019, Robinhood had conducted a more extensive internal analysis, which showed that its execution quality and price improvement metrics were substantially worse than other retail broker-dealers in many respects, including the percentage of orders that received price improvement and the amount of price improvement, measured on a per order, per share, and per dollar traded basis.
But again, it's a relative issue. For small trades, overall you got a better deal than paying a slightly better price plus a fixed commission. For large trades, nope. So, at Robinhood the rich big traders subsidised the smaller ones. Kind of fitting for the name.
> For most orders of more than 100 shares, the analysis concluded that Robinhood customers would be better off trading at another broker-dealer because the additional price improvement that such orders would receive at other broker-dealers would likely exceed the approximately $5 per-order commission costs that those broker-dealers were then charging.
All in all, I think their model is defensible, but lying about it isn't.
ETA: To be clear, I think their pricing and revenue model is defensible. But: a 10$ fee for a long term trade is also pretty negligible. What Robinhood have democratised is day trading and gambling, and that's not good.
> democratised is day trading and gambling, and that's not good
why is it not good? I think as long as the person doing the trading understands the consequences of their actions, they should be allowed to make that trade. If you could prove that people are being defrauded into thinking trading is risk free, then the problem isn't with robinhood but with education and awareness, and that issue must be solved at a societal level, rather than placing all responsibility onto the company providing a utility.