Robinhood Aims to Expand But Still Make Investing Fun
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Here's your Money Briefing for Monday, December 16th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Since its launch, online brokerage Robinhood has been a disruptor, giving individual investors an entryway to buying stocks, ETFs, and crypto in ways other companies didn't. Co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev is the featured guest on this week's episode of WSJ's Take on the Week. Here's co-host Telus Demos.
What first got our attention at The Wall Street Journal about Robinhood was its accessibility and the audience that it was bringing in. But it also drew a lot of criticism toward them because it made it seem like, have they made investing too fun and too accessible? And have they gamified what should be a serious business? And that's something that they've had to deal with. And that's something that we also talked with Vlad about.
We'll hear more from Telus after the break.
Listen at schwab.com slash washingtonwise.
Robinhood is aiming to broaden its core users beyond mostly younger investors. Co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev joined our sister podcast, WSJ's Take on the Week. Co-host Telus Demos joins me. Telus, congratulations on you and Gunshin Banerjee being named co-hosts. What's the show about?
Thank you. WSJ's Take on the Week is back after a hiatus. We are focused on giving our audience a leg up on the world of money and investing. So the idea is we have these great conversations in the newsroom between reporters, right?
How did Robinhood become a disruptor in online brokerage?
So Gunjan and I sit next to each other at the journal, and we literally just talk all day sometimes about what's going on in the market. Hey, did you see this? Hey, did you see that? Check this out. Oh, this is up. This is down. We're bringing you those conversations every week, and then we're also bringing you an interview with with insiders in the worlds of market, finance, economy.
And your most recent guest was Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev. He joined you and your co-host Gunjan Banerjee in the studio to talk about the company and its plans.
Active traders are people that want to be at the forefront of technology and innovation and trading and financial services. They care about really amazing tools. They want low latency. They want data and performance. But it's a niche market, one that we value and we want to win that market.
So why him and why now?
Robinhood has really just become such a central part of the discussion about our markets today, and that is because they are a funnel for retail investors, for individuals who want to get into markets and start to think and trade about markets to start to do that. They're also just an interesting company, breaking the mold a little bit in some ways about how they build their brokerage business. And we're in a moment where, look, those people who didn't already know Robinhood probably got to know them at the what we all call now the meme stock mania, right? Remember GameStop and all the wild trading? You might have seen the documentary on Netflix. That was a big moment and really put Robinhood on the map, them being a character in that drama.
And I think that what's happening now in markets is interesting because we're not going through the same exact meme stock mania, but I think that we are in a moment where retail investors are really – out there in force and they are trading around the election. They are participating through prediction markets. Robinhood now, right before the election, launched event contracts. People are trading crypto.
What aspects of Robinhood’s user experience sparked controversy about gamification?
We've seen Bitcoin hit $100,000 and a lot of that is being driven by small investors or at least small investors are very
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