Robinhood Said to Get 40% Revenue from HFT Firms Like Citadel (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Robinhood Said to Get 40% Revenue from HFT Firms Like Citadel (2018)

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218 pointsKhelavaster69 comments

They got hit with a $65M SEC settlement for this last December: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinhood_(company)#SEC_Probe_...

This is a clear case of "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product".

Yeah, but now almost every brokerage is 0 commission unless you are trading large blocks.

And chances are if you're trading large blocks you have a lot of money, making you a premium customer, meaning you get free trades anyway!

Yeah but not all of them are selling order flow. E.g. Vanguard and Fidelity don't sell order flow and haven't blocked purchases of these stocks. They make their money the same way banks do.

Can one buy stocks through Vanguard?

Yes, Vanguard supports individual stocks with no trading fees.

I’ll gladly be the product for 0 commission trades.

You're not the product, it's a wrong analogy. You simply pay hidden fees embedded in the slightly higher price you pay.

Will you also have your shares sold out from under you for those same 0 commission trades?

If you're referring to what happened to margin accounts at RH, what does that have to do with 0 commission?

Everyone should contact the SEC to make sure that they don't let them get it away with it this time (even if the SEC did the right thing in December).

Please stop spreading this meme. If you're actually curious about the role HFT plays in price enhancement for retail trading, check out Matt Levine under section "Robinhood".

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-16/carl-i...

We're suggesting ulterior motive in Robinhood shutting down GME trading. GME has caused Citadel tremendous risks/losses. Citadel loaned $2.75 billion to Melvin before Melvin liquidated over GME.

Maybe Citadel's updated their position but I think it's still shorter-term bearish.

Nothing to do w/ unwanted attention from politicians and regulators?

What does HFT have to do with buying up retail trade streams before they are put on the market? Surely HFT can exist without that.

And the OP is right, the trader is 100% the product in this scenario and the trade stream buyers are the real customers.

Honest question: Is there a way to circumvent these HFT firms and create a direct trading app with retailers interest in mind?

If yes I'd love to work with someone to make this happen (technical person here).

Sure, if people wanted to pay to trade.

If you want commission free trading then you need the HFT firms and payment for order flow. These firms hurt institutional investors much more than retail.

Let's say it's not commission free. What are the actual costs for paying per trade. What's the math for monthly subscription if we follow Netflix model?

Not true; you can make money off of interest on cash, and interest from lending stock to shorters.

In order to process actual securities orders to actual exchanges, you'll need to file a metric ton of paperwork with your state government and the federal government, and comply with a lot of regulations.

And the infrastructure, market access, lisences

You can directly route all your orders to an exchange, but HFT firms are active there as well, and they might even get paid for it by the exchange (which you have to pay much higher commissions than what retail traders are paying right now). All alternatives eventually end up reinventing what the HFT firms do.

Or creating an alternative exchange in which HFT is not allowed.

But it must be possible to build an app which serves retailers as the customers vs these HFTs? For example, charging monthly subscription or paying micro fees per trade. What are the costs involved for trading directly in exchanges?

I am not familiar with the legal aspect, but technically this is definitely possible. You basically just need to rent a server in an exchange colo center, and buy software certified to submit trades / consume market data on that exchange. Then build your brokerage app on top of that "direct market access" software.

I'd love to see something like Uniswap for stocks. Essentially replacing the orderbook with an equation taking HFTs out of the equation and allowing regular users to make money providing liquidity.

Regulations make that more or less illegal. Executions must happen at the NBBO (national best bid / offer). You can't arbitrarily choose which orders to match.

IEX is an exchange with the goal of executing its trades without HFT firms in the middle. https://iextrading.com/

The harder part for the average person is ensuring their brokerage routes their order flow through IEX. I am not sure how the average person would do that.

> 40% of Robinhood's revenues earlier this year were derived from selling its customers' orders to firms

This has been openly known for years now. The article presents it as “stealing” but it’s really more the case of data leakage and the market becoming less optimal. Free trading isn’t possible without something to pay for it unfortunately.

> This has been openly known for years now.

And likely nobody cared about it, until now when there’s a huge conflict of interest for RH and they’ve chosen a side (against their users).

“ Just got a tip that Citadel reloaded their shorts before they told Robinhood to stop trading $GME.

If this is true, Ken Griffin and the Robinhood founders should be in jail.

This is class warfare.”

https://mobile.twitter.com/justinkan/status/1354853920762253...

It's troubling how blatant this is. They clearly have confidence that they will not suffer any adverse consequences, otherwise they'd have taken more steps to cover their tracks.

They should be in jail, after being stripped of all their assets.

What about this should be illegal? Holding naked shorts? Or telling Robinhood to do something?

I'm taking it with a huge grain of salt and doubt it happened. But... assumming it did... calling brokerage firms to stop buy orders from retail investors so you can drive down the price of stock? If that isn't illegal what the fuck is?

You can "tell" anyone anything. Look, you're telling them right now they should open up trading for these stocks!

These HFT firms hold power over Robinhood - that's what TFA is about. This is actual market manipulation.

This looks ugly but how do we trust the anonymous Redditor who is claiming to be Robinhood employee.

This seems pretty speculative and a huge risk for Citadel as an institution.

I think most of their profit is coming from volume as a market maker. They capture small dollars on the bid/ask spread.

Will be interesting to see the fallout if the SEC digs in more. But I would take this with a grain of salt.

Citadel also runs an active hedge fund.

That is so messed up, and that’s unfortunately how the whole world works. People in power will never give it up willingly.

If this is true than people will likely go to jail. The images of Ken Griffin being arrested outside his $230 million penthouse because of some redditors trolling will be quite the scene.

This is 100% class warfare.

If you have some $GME - hold.

bad advice. you only need to trade 1 share for the stock to become worthless. Holding doesn't ensure the price stays where it is.

These type of comments just feel naive to me. Maybe this hurts a few firms and causes losses for a few billionaires, but do people think there aren't other firms and other billionaires making a killing on this too?

The point is not to hurt all billionaires, but those who hold 140% short positions.

That isn't "100% class warfare" then.

https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHS%20SEC%2... from https://robinhood.com/us/en/about/legal/ enumerates their revenue from PFOF.

Well the way it looks now, if they don't watch their steps they won't have a userbase with their latest trick they pulled.

Since Interactive Brokers isn't "free trading" (a la Robinhood), why would it also block buying GME stock?

Its PR. Makes them look good. SEC isnt stepping in - so they are. A la Twitter.

From what I can tell, IB seems to have initially blocked just trading on margin. Which makes sense, given the extreme volatility of the collateral.

But then shortly later, they set to liquidation only. I’d guesstimate that 80%+ of IBs customer base trades with leverage. So, I’d bet that their internal systems had no reliable to block margin trading, but allow unleveraged positions

Turning off names like AMC and GME only means less revenue for RobinHood....

Wrong because RobinHood is paid handsomely by the shorts.

To clarify how this works:

There is a public book of buy/sell orders.

HFTs would prefer not to put their orders on these books for various legitimate reasons (including fees).

If (and only if) HFTs (or other trading firms) are willing to offer the user a better price than the best available price on the market, Robin Hood will just give the order to them instead of placing the order on the public market.

So if the market price is $10, and an HFT is willing to sell for $9.95, then Robin Hood might give the user an execution price of $9.97 and keep the 2 cents to themselves.

The user gets a better price than they would have on the open market, and a better price than they were expecting.

Does Citadel use this data for anything besides HFT front running? For example, I would think not just knowing price and volume or a stock but knowing who exactly is buying it and in what quantities would end up being a far more valuable source of alpha. I'd love to learn more about the potential techniques they are using.

They are not allowed to use it for very much at all, but Citadel has regularly been fined for breaking rules.

It’s not front running. It’s reducing the chance of adverse selection in market making. Front running is highly illegal.

Citadel gets first dibs on trades from Robinhood users. If they want the trade they take it, otherwise they send it on to some place else.

Fidelity does this also and runs ads on TV that explain the trading process that are factually correct if not clear on why exactly the HFT is paying for order flow.

Basically the HFT is "making the market"; somebody wants to buy 5 shares of this stock, a moment later somebody wants to sell 6, the HFT is a buffer between all of those people. With exclusive order flow from Robinhood, Fidelity or somebody like that they have a big pool of liquidity if all of a sudden their trading strategy says they should buy or sell that.

Fidelity is explicit that it does not take payment for order flow.

Not a user of RH, but I cannot imagine they aren't gathering these kind of analytics on their users as well as the order flow data.

It's worth pointing out that the HFT pays robinhood $.02 to receive the order, and then may or may not fill the order at <= $10. These are separate happenings, and robinhood does not ever receive part of the variable price improvement.

Edit: And it is possible for the HFT to lose money when doing this, if they pay the $.02 PFOF and then pay the same price as the market.

Seems that the user is worse off than the situation where the HFT had to play by everyone else's rules and list publicly at $9.95 though.

why the HFT should sell for $9.95 if the market price is $10 ?

Because they know that the market price is _actually_ $9.93, but that just hasn't reached everyone yet, hence the "high frequency" in "high frequency trading".

Becuase the market price isn't $10. There is a price people are willing to buy and a price that people are willing to sell- which makes sense because if there's a price in the market someone is willing to sell at and I'm willing to buy at that price I won't put an order in the market at all - I'll just trade against their order. So there's a difference between the bid and the ask. So in the market you'll have people willing to buy at $9.90 and sell for $10. Now in reality the true value is somewhere in that range. But if I think the real value is $9.93 I might not want to put an offer in the market for $9.95 because the price might move, and if the price moves I'm stuck paying $9.95 for something that just dropped to $9.70. For the offers I put into the market, I have to add some extra margin to account for risk. Whereas if you come directly to me and say you want to $9.95 - well I know you're not going to move the market, so maybe I'm willing to trade with you for a smaller margin, safe in the knowledge I'm not taking on a very risky trade.

How is HFT making money? It seems like they should make some kind of an arbitrage.

Is that like a dark pool? Where do HFTs make this available?

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