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For decades retail investors were overlooked and underserved. The rich might have dabbled in trading stocks directly, but most workers earned defined-benefit pensions, which kicked any portfolio-management decisions regarding their biggest pot of savings to pension funds. The transition to self-directed 401K retirement plans, registered investment advisers and retail brokers was at first accompanied by wide trading spreads and meaty fees.
几十年来，散户投资者都被忽视，得到的服务也不够。富人可能早已直接进入股票交易市场，但大多数工人获得的是固定收益的养老金，这导致他们所有的投资组合管理决定都与养老基金相关。起初，向自我导向的401K退休计划、注册投资顾问和零售经纪人的转变，都伴随着巨大的交易差价和巨额费用。
Then the adoption of new technologies—such as computerised trading and wicked-fast marketmaking algorithms—helped erode spreads. In 2013 Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s founders and former employees of marketmakers, saw that it might be possible for a retail broker to make money by offering consumers commission-free stock trading. It could instead earn revenues through “payment for order flow”. This is the practice by which a high-frequency marketmaker pays a broker a cut of the spread it earns from trading in exchange for the broker directing its customers’ trades to the marketmaker.
后来，新技术的采用——比如计算机化交易和极快的做市算法——帮助降低了价差。2013年，Robinhood的创始人拜菊·巴特(Baiju Bhatt)和弗拉德·特涅夫(Vlad Tenev)发现，零售经纪商或许可以通过向消费者提供免佣金的股票交易来赚钱。相反，它可以通过“订单流支付”来赚取收入。通过这种做法，高频做市商向经纪商支付交易差价的一部分，作为交换，经纪商将客户的交易引流给做市商。
For a time the big retail brokers ignored the plucky upstart and continued to charge commissions and fees. But by 2019 the writing was on the wall. A quick, brutal price war broke out. Charles Schwab, followed by E*Trade, TD Ameritrade and eventually the biggest broker of all, Fidelity, succumbed, scrapping their commissions and trading fees.
有一段时间，大型零售经纪商并没有重视这种大胆的新模式，他们继续收取佣金和费用。但到了2019年，不祥之兆已成定局。一场迅速又残酷的价格战爆发了。嘉信理财(Charles Schwab)、E*Trade (E*Trade)、TD Ameritrade以及最后，最大的经纪商富达(Fidelity)都屈服了，取消了它们的佣金和交易费用。
Lower costs for investors are a laudable thing. At Robinhood’s roadshow Mr Tenev claimed that his firm helped people buy shares in firms they love and got them excited about investing. By Robinhood’s reckoning, half of all brokerage accounts opened in America since 2015 have been set up on its platform. But the broker has also been at the centre of unease about the retail revolution, which peaked during the speculative frenzy in GameStop, a struggling video-game retailer, earlier this year. The company’s share price spiked from $17 in January to more than $450 two weeks later. So much of the trading volume came from retail investors, and so much of it was directed through Robinhood, that the broker was forced to suspend trading in GameStop because it lacked the capital to cover the two-day lag between its users’ trades and their settlement.
对投资者来说，成本降低是值得称赞的事情。在Robinhood的路演中，Tenev先生声称他的公司会帮助人们购买他们喜欢的公司的股票，并让他们对投资感到兴奋。据Robinhood估计，2015年以来在美国开设的所有经纪账户中，有一半是通过其平台开设的。但这家经纪商也一直处于人们对零售革命担忧的风口浪尖上。今年早些时候，在苦苦挣扎的视频游戏零售商GameStop的投机狂潮中，人们的担忧达到了巅峰。两周后，GameStop的股价从1月份的17美元飙升至450美元以上。大量的交易来自散户投资者，也有大量的交易是通过Robinhood引流的，导致Robinhood被迫暂停GameStop的交易，因为它没有足够的资金去填补用户交易和结算之间两天延迟期的金额。
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