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The queasiness over Robinhood’s success stems from two sources. For a start, when the price of something falls, people tend to do more of it. According to data in the firm’s IPO filing, around half of its users check their investments on its app every day. But plenty of research papers find that the more people trade, the worse their returns. Another concern is that Robinhood exposes its users to risky products. Its profit margins are slimmest for the vanilla stuff, like stock trading, but rise as its customers dabble in riskier, more complicated markets, such as trading derivatives or buying cryptocurrencies. Although options and cryptocurrencies make up about 17% of the $80bn in assets that Robinhood oversees, more than half of its transaction revenues come from these categories.
人們對Robinhood的成功感到不安有兩個原因。首先，當某樣東西的價格下跌時，人們往往越會去買這樣東西。根據該公司IPO文件中的數據，大約一半的用戶每天都在其應用上查看自己的投資。但大量研究論文發現，人們交易越頻繁，回報就越低。另一個擔憂是Robinhood會將其用戶暴露在高風險產品中。在股票交易等普通業務方面，它的利潤率是最低的，但隨著客戶涉足風險更大、更復雜的市場，比如交易衍生品或購買加密貨幣，它的利潤率會上升。在Robinhood管理的800億美元資產中，雖然期權和加密貨幣僅占17%，但超過一半的交易收入來自這些類別。
These worries have led lawmakers to question whether retail investors stand to make any gains from Robinhood. Summoned to Congress after the GameStop affair, Mr Tenev claimed that its users had earned more than $35bn in profits by buying stocks and investments, compared with what they had deposited with the broker. But Jim Himes, a congressman from Connecticut and a former banker, skewered him. “$35bn is a meaningless number unless you convert it to a rate of return so that I can compare it to Treasuries, so I can compare it to the S&P 500.” Mr Tenev deflected, claiming the right comparison was the lower bar of “not investing at all” because many of Robinhood’s customers were new to trading.
人們的擔憂導致立法者質疑散戶投資者是否能在Robinhood上獲利。發生GameStop事件后，Tenev被傳喚到了美國國會，他表示，與存入Robinhood的本金相比，其用戶通過購買股票和投資賺取了逾350億美元的利潤。但來自康涅狄格州的國會議員、前銀行家吉姆·海姆斯(Jim Himes)對他進行了抨擊。“350億美元是一個毫無意義的數字，除非你把它轉換成收益率，這樣我就可以把它與美國國債進行比較，與標準普爾500指數(S&P 500)進行比較。”Tenev轉移了話題，聲稱正確的比較是“完全不投資”的下限，因為Robinhood的許多客戶都是新手。
Whether the firm’s empowerment of retail investors has been desirable or not is more than a philosophical matter. It is also the key question that any investor in Robinhood, institutional or retail, will have to wrestle with, because it pertains to where the potential risks and rewards lie. It is also a subject on which punters and regulators seem to disagree.
該公司授權散戶投資者是否可取，不僅僅是一個哲學問題。這也是Robinhood的任何投資者，無論是機構投資者還是散戶投資者，都必須努力解決的關鍵問題，因為這關系到潛在的風險和回報所在的地方。在這個問題上，投資者和監管者似乎也存在分歧。
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