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For decades retail investors were overlooked and underserved. The rich might have dabbled in trading stocks directly, but most workers earned defined-benefit pensions, which kicked any portfolio-management decisions regarding their biggest pot of savings to pension funds. The transition to self-directed 401K retirement plans, registered investment advisers and retail brokers was at first accompanied by wide trading spreads and meaty fees.
幾十年來，散戶投資者都被忽視，得到的服務(wù)也不夠。富人可能早已直接進(jìn)入股票交易市場，但大多數(shù)工人獲得的是固定收益的養(yǎng)老金，這導(dǎo)致他們所有的投資組合管理決定都與養(yǎng)老基金相關(guān)。起初，向自我導(dǎo)向的401K退休計(jì)劃、注冊投資顧問和零售經(jīng)紀(jì)人的轉(zhuǎn)變，都伴隨著巨大的交易差價和巨額費(fèi)用。
Then the adoption of new technologies—such as computerised trading and wicked-fast marketmaking algorithms—helped erode spreads. In 2013 Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s founders and former employees of marketmakers, saw that it might be possible for a retail broker to make money by offering consumers commission-free stock trading. It could instead earn revenues through “payment for order flow”. This is the practice by which a high-frequency marketmaker pays a broker a cut of the spread it earns from trading in exchange for the broker directing its customers’ trades to the marketmaker.
后來，新技術(shù)的采用——比如計(jì)算機(jī)化交易和極快的做市算法——幫助降低了價差。2013年，Robinhood的創(chuàng)始人拜菊·巴特(Baiju Bhatt)和弗拉德·特涅夫(Vlad Tenev)發(fā)現(xiàn)，零售經(jīng)紀(jì)商或許可以通過向消費(fèi)者提供免傭金的股票交易來賺錢。相反，它可以通過“訂單流支付”來賺取收入。通過這種做法，高頻做市商向經(jīng)紀(jì)商支付交易差價的一部分，作為交換，經(jīng)紀(jì)商將客戶的交易引流給做市商。
For a time the big retail brokers ignored the plucky upstart and continued to charge commissions and fees. But by 2019 the writing was on the wall. A quick, brutal price war broke out. Charles Schwab, followed by E*Trade, TD Ameritrade and eventually the biggest broker of all, Fidelity, succumbed, scrapping their commissions and trading fees.
有一段時間，大型零售經(jīng)紀(jì)商并沒有重視這種大膽的新模式，他們繼續(xù)收取傭金和費(fèi)用。但到了2019年，不祥之兆已成定局。一場迅速又殘酷的價格戰(zhàn)爆發(fā)了。嘉信理財(cái)(Charles Schwab)、E*Trade (E*Trade)、TD Ameritrade以及最后，最大的經(jīng)紀(jì)商富達(dá)(Fidelity)都屈服了，取消了它們的傭金和交易費(fèi)用。
Lower costs for investors are a laudable thing. At Robinhood’s roadshow Mr Tenev claimed that his firm helped people buy shares in firms they love and got them excited about investing. By Robinhood’s reckoning, half of all brokerage accounts opened in America since 2015 have been set up on its platform. But the broker has also been at the centre of unease about the retail revolution, which peaked during the speculative frenzy in GameStop, a struggling video-game retailer, earlier this year. The company’s share price spiked from $17 in January to more than $450 two weeks later. So much of the trading volume came from retail investors, and so much of it was directed through Robinhood, that the broker was forced to suspend trading in GameStop because it lacked the capital to cover the two-day lag between its users’ trades and their settlement.
對投資者來說，成本降低是值得稱贊的事情。在Robinhood的路演中，Tenev先生聲稱他的公司會幫助人們購買他們喜歡的公司的股票，并讓他們對投資感到興奮。據(jù)Robinhood估計(jì)，2015年以來在美國開設(shè)的所有經(jīng)紀(jì)賬戶中，有一半是通過其平臺開設(shè)的。但這家經(jīng)紀(jì)商也一直處于人們對零售革命擔(dān)憂的風(fēng)口浪尖上。今年早些時候，在苦苦掙扎的視頻游戲零售商GameStop的投機(jī)狂潮中，人們的擔(dān)憂達(dá)到了巔峰。兩周后，GameStop的股價從1月份的17美元飆升至450美元以上。大量的交易來自散戶投資者，也有大量的交易是通過Robinhood引流的，導(dǎo)致Robinhood被迫暫停GameStop的交易，因?yàn)樗鼪]有足夠的資金去填補(bǔ)用戶交易和結(jié)算之間兩天延遲期的金額。
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