Vlad Tenev

And it was around this whole payment for order flow topic that-

Michael Lewis popularized with his book.

And the gist of it was, well, you know, they say they're commission free, but this payment for order flow thing, like they're not really talking about that.

And it was positioned as some kind of catch.

Yeah, it was almost as if they were claiming we invented it.

But the reality was all of the incumbents, pretty much, they all accepted the commissions and the payment for order flow.

And still has been, right?

So for example, TD Ameritrade, you look at their financials at the time,

they made about eleven dollars a trade ten dollars of it was from the trading commission the one dollar was payment for order flow so when we remove the commissions their stock went down 35 for a reason as a company they were making much less money but yeah the public positioning was actually

Is Robinhood making even more from the payment for order flow thing than they would have been if they had charged commissions?

And is this even, is this like a worse thing for customers?

How do you think that idea started?

Now I kind of understand how these things work.

I don't think it was organic, right?

I think it was probably just on background.

probably talking to the incumbents, the big guys, talking to journalists, also simultaneously talking about us in Washington and getting the regulators riled up.

I mean,

It would be foolish for me to think that they had the business model, the lowering commissions to zero part of the playbook worked out.

I mean, that's actually really hard.

The easier stuff is to talk bad about you on background to reporters and journalists and to sort of like raise a stink in Washington.