愚蠢金钱的胜利

A deadly pandemic has you stuck at home and out of work. You’ve finished watchingTiger King,and trading turnips onAnimal Crossing中国的秸秆市场不再有同样的刺激。

Your phone pings. A friend has sent you a free stock on an app called Robinhood. You sign up. Flush with larger-than-usual unemployment checks and incentivized by zero-commission trades and endless in-app bells and whistles, you begin to trade. And trade. And trade. Your latest buy? GameStop.

对于thousands of Americans last year, a version of this scene played out, sparking a retail investment renaissance that rivals that of the late ’90s, according to industry experts.

专业投资者对此并不满意。

在2020年，批评罗比尼奥及其客户的停电和糟糕的投资决策几乎成了芬特维蒂和业内专家的一项运动。

Back in June, Omega Advisors founder Leon Cooperman said on aCNBC分部that Robinhood traders’ speculation would “end in tears.” The same month, venture capital darling Chamath Palihapitiya criticized the app on Twitter for using payment for order flow to keep trading free for customers.

But it turns out that these professionals needed retail investors: As professionals fled the market in February, Robinhood traders bought up stocks, acting as a market-stabilizing force, according to observers.

The phenomenon被跟踪弗吉尼亚大学的Simon Glossner和Pedro Matos以及苏黎世大学的Stefano Ramelli和Alexander Wagner的研究人员。

They looked at how institutions managed their investments during the first wave of the pandemic. By and large, allocators were “rushing to exit” the markets, Matos says. So who was buying those assets? “That led us to Robinhood,” according to Matos, who spoke with亚博赞助欧冠通过电话。

该应用程序的数据证实，散户投资者充当了机构的流动性提供者，购买了配置者出售的资产。马托斯指出：“我们的证据表明，投资者起到了稳定市场的小作用。”。

罗比尼奥首席执行官兼联合创始人弗拉德特内夫（Vlad Tenev）在电子邮件中被问及这一动态时表示，公司很自豪能将新的投资者引入市场：“正是那些被排除在投资之外的人，现在终于找到了家。”

他补充道，“在所有券商中，股票所有权都比罗比尼奥成立时更年轻、更多样化。”

That fact — along with trading outages and how Robinhood makes its money — is exactly what has so-called industry experts so worried.

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Banks of lights一个接一个地说，露出一个男人坐在空荡荡的办公室里。他问观众：“你想过股票交易吗？“他接着强调了交易的高成本——”通常每单交易高达10美元。”

Enter Robinhood, the subject of this2013 adand the first brokerage firm to offer zero-commission trading. In the less-than-two-minutes-long advertisement, the man executes a trade. “People like us can trade just like the big guys,” he says. “With Robinhood.”

太平洋资本投资总监达林•塔特尔（Darin Tuttle）第一次听说罗比尼奥时，正是从那则广告中得知的。塔特尔在电话里说：“我说‘哇，这是自切片面包以来最好的东西了。’”。“以前从来没有人做过零佣金交易。”

他第二天就下载了这个应用程序。塔特尔当时在先锋集团工作，所以他已经知道投资。下载后不久，他就在应用程序上浏览了投资者教育信息。他清楚地意识到，“投资者教育的描述是如此的基本和淡化，以至于我知道开发应用程序的人不知道他们在说什么。”

Tuttle deleted the app.

然而他对罗比尼奥的兴趣并没有消退。他所在公司的一名实习生在该应用程序的工作之外进行交易，因此塔特尔开始在这个过程中对他进行指导。他帮助实习生创建了一份交易日志，鼓励他对图表和研究进行截图，并制定了选择投资的标准：每笔交易有两行理由。

塔特尔说：“我希望他继续这样做。“如果你在罗比尼奥身上赚到了钱，你会得到更多的权力。”

然而，问题是，正如在线论坛所揭示的那样，很多人在罗比尼奥身上是亏钱的，而不是赚钱的。

A year before Robinhood launched, Reddit users set up r/wallstreetbets, a subreddit about the stock market popular among retail investors and day traders.

自subreddit成立以来，一个由散户投资者组成的在线社区迅速发展起来，他们利用Twitter的cashtag功能来炒作自己喜欢的交易，该功能允许用户使用带有美元符号而不是散列符号的股票代码进行搜索。如今，交易者不仅仅用Twitter谈论股票。他们在Discord、TikTok和Instagram等平台上。

Retail investing influencers have emerged, too. Some stream themselves buying and selling stocks; others share their picks on private Discord servers that followers must pay to secure access to. For Robinhood influencers there’s another advantage: The app offers free stocks to those who get their friends to sign up.

In some cases, these influencers will use their stardom to push certain stories on a stock, says Godefroy Schrago, a partner at hedge fund research firm Sanostro. “It creates a kind of digital boiler room where you cannot really prove that it’s a coordinated way to push specific stocks,” he says.

Godefroy explains that retail investing influencers offer similar information to paying subscribers and to followers — they just target the paying subscribers first. The influencer will buy a stock, then tell his or her premium subscribers about it. Those subscribers buy the stock, and only then does the influencer share the stock pick on social media.

“They manage to really move the markets with the tweets,” Godefroy says, adding that in his view, “the problem is the relevant information becomes not what the company says, but what one specific influencer says about an announcement.”

The misinformation that spreads online has had real-life consequences. For some, financial ruin followed risky investments, overleveraging, and options trading. For one, the consequences were fatal.

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On June 12去年夏天，在芝加哥西郊的纳珀维尔，亚历克斯·卡恩斯发现自己在罗比尼奥的账户上有超过73万美元的赤字——很可能是杠杆和未结算股票造成的暂时余额。但卡恩斯不知道。那天他自杀身亡。

A flurry of negative attention followed. But Robinhood’s critics don’t focus just on retail investors’ inexperience and the real-life fallout that can have. They cite concerns about how the company makes its money.

“It wasn’t clear until a couple of years ago how they were offsetting the free trades,” says Dr. Richard Smith, chief executive officer at the Foundation for the Study of Cycles.

Instead of charging customers to make trades, Robinhood uses payment for order flow, a process by which a market maker pays a preset fee (in Robinhood’s case, less than a penny per executed trade) to the broker. According to Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 606 disclosures, it’s a practice said to have been pioneered by Bernie Madoff and used by Fidelity, e*Trade, Charles Schwab, and TD Ameritrade, among others.

That didn’t stop Robinhood from being flamedon Twitterafter Zero Hedge published a report on the subject. Billionaire investor Palihapitiya tweeted that the practice was “shady AF” and would “f––– over” retail traders.

史密斯指出，Robinhood来自硅谷的思维模式，在那里，应用程序的用户，而不是应用程序本身，是它的产品。他说：“他们有很强的动力驱使客户进行交易。”。“当客户交易时，他们会赚钱。”

As I was working on this story, I downloaded Robinhood and opened a small portfolio. From my limited experience, it appears Smith is right — there is not much friction in the trading process. It took little time and effort to fund my account and buy shares. Robinhood sends me push notifications when the stocks I buy make big moves, prompting me to look at the app, where I’m faced with the decision of whether to hold the stock or sell. When I’m looking at a stock’s information on Robinhood, the trade button is always within reach, sitting exactly where my right thumb hovers before I scroll.

“我们坚决不同意我们的平台是‘游戏化’的说法，”Robinhood的一位发言人通过电子邮件表示，并补充说：“区分无障碍、现代设计和游戏化很重要。对于年轻一代来说，陈旧的平台同样会成为投资的障碍，成为贸易佣金和账户最低限额。”

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This isn’t the firstretail investment boom. “We saw something fairly similar happen years ago with e*Trade and Schwab that disrupted the retail broker space,” says Kim Muhota, head of financial services, North America, at global consulting firm SSA & Co.

“在90年代，快速交易的能力是一个新奇的想法，”他补充道。但是当2000年科技泡沫破灭时，零售商人损失了很多钱。

投资管理公司Sender Company&Partners的创始人亚当•森德（Adam Sender）表示：“这一代的散户投资者和日间交易者被严重烧伤，他们不想与未来的市场有任何关系。”。

“When Robinhood and these other platforms went to zero commissions, it made it tempting for retail investors to trade stocks and options and take a chance again,” he adds.

Case in point: GameStop, the brick-and-mortar video game retailer that is quickly being replaced by online gaming marketplaces like Steam. Despite this, GameStop’s stock — which had been trading at about $40 last week — shot up 62 percent Friday, triggering a circuit breaker.

周一股市继续上涨，收盘时上涨18%。

Although there are some legitimate reasons for a price spike (ex–Chewy CEO Ryan Cohen made a large investment in the retailer and has since been added to its board), the massive upswing has been attributed to retail investors.

And even if they lost out, the retail crowd is, as some put it, in it “for the meme.” To wit: One of r/wallstreetbets’ top posts on Monday was made by someone looking for flair (Reddit’s tagging system) for buying GameStop’s stock at its peak.

As one commenter put it: “Classic GameStop. Buy at full price, return for a fraction of what you paid.”

Says Sender, “That’s the great thing about trading some of these companies today; valuation doesn’t matter. It’s all about greed and fear now. Human emotion is a major factor in the market again — just like the late ’90s.”

Sender had his first go-round with investing during that period, having worked at S.A.C. Capital before striking out on his own and starting a firm called Exis Capital Management. He followed how retail investors traded and made decisions informed by their habits.

“I wouldn’t be as disrespectful as to call them dumb money, but there are a lot of professionals who do,” he says.

Exis Capital shut down in 2014, but two years later, Sender returned to the market with his actively managed hedge fund. Nowadays the firm, which manages nearly $200 million in assets, tracks Twitter and blogs for intel on how retail investors trade. It’s not the only way Sender makes trading decisions, but it’s certainly part of the equation.

他表示：“过去十年对主动型基金经理来说非常困难，因为我们处于一个由etf和quant主导的低VIX世界。”。然而，对于他的公司来说，2020年是相当成功的：据投资管理公司的一位发言人说，扣除费用后，它增长了69.39%。

Sender isn’t the only institution using retail investment information to trade.

据塔特尔称，散户投资者也增加了期权市场的流动性，有助于太平洋资本的团队形成预测。这个新的现实改变了他的团队对期权交易的看法，因为他们可以更快地完成订单。塔特尔说：“期权利息到处都有流动性，其中很大一部分是由罗比尼奥推动的。”。

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But for Robinhood,2020年以一个糟糕的结局结束。去年12月，这家公司受到了冲击打官司from the Massachusetts secretary of the Commonwealth that alleged that the company was targeting inexperienced investors using gamification.

“Once individuals become customers, Robinhood relentlessly bombards them with a number of strategies designed to encourage and incentivize continuous and repeated engagement with its application,” the complaint says, noting that Robinhood “rewards its customers with colorful confetti raining down their screens” after they trade.

一位公司发言人通过电子邮件说:“我们disagree with the allegations in the complaint by the Massachusetts Securities Division and intend to defend the company vigorously. Robinhood is a self-directed broker-dealer and we do not make investment recommendations. Over the past several months, we’ve worked diligently to ensure our systems scale and are available when people need them. We’ve also made significant improvements to our options offering, adding safeguards and enhanced educational materials.”

Also in December, the秒charged the company with misleading investors about its revenue sources, particularlypayment for order flow. Robinhood paid a $65 million fine and didn’t admit to or deny its involvement in the practices.

该公司首席法务官丹•加拉赫（dangallagher）通过电子邮件表示：“和解涉及到的历史惯例并不反映罗比尼奥现在的情况。”。“我们认识到帮助数以百万计的投资者进行首次投资所带来的责任，我们致力于继续发展罗比尼奥，以满足客户的需求。”

Robinhood’s Tenev credits the app with making investing more “culturally relevant.”

他今年有远大的目标。他说：“在我们展望2021年之际，我们都在巩固我们已经开展的重要工作。”。“要纠正美国这条船，还有很多事情要做。我们致力于尽自己的一份力量。”

Robinhood’s users are glad the app is doing so — at least they will be as long as stocks go up.