Is it reasonable for the NYT journalist to use total payment order flow revenue / average dollar amount per account instead of diving by total number of accounts? The latter seems like it would be a cleaner way to say "this is, on average, how much they're making off of each person"
Whatever it is - Robinhood is cleaning up. Wish I was invested in the company instead of just using it.
Anyway, the point here is to stoke anger from RH customers by calling them stupid (making bad trades). Dividing their revenue by number of accounts would tell a different story, one that would also anger customers because, again, it paints them in a bad light. But this time their stupidity would manifest itself by allowing RH to profit so much more than other brokerages.
I believe this is true. The metric, revenue per mean dollar, is used in the industry as a measure of how productively customers’ assets are being monetised. It lets bank managers compare e.g. trading and wealth management. Given a lot of compliance costs scale with accounts and assets, not volumes, the measure makes sense.