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The queasiness over Robinhood’s success stems from two sources. For a start, when the price of something falls, people tend to do more of it. According to data in the firm’s IPO filing, around half of its users check their investments on its app every day. But plenty of research papers find that the more people trade, the worse their returns. Another concern is that Robinhood exposes its users to risky products. Its profit margins are slimmest for the vanilla stuff, like stock trading, but rise as its customers dabble in riskier, more complicated markets, such as trading derivatives or buying cryptocurrencies. Although options and cryptocurrencies make up about 17% of the $80bn in assets that Robinhood oversees, more than half of its transaction revenues come from these categories.
人们对Robinhood的成功感到不安有两个原因。首先，当某样东西的价格下跌时，人们往往越会去买这样东西。根据该公司IPO文件中的数据，大约一半的用户每天都在其应用上查看自己的投资。但大量研究论文发现，人们交易越频繁，回报就越低。另一个担忧是Robinhood会将其用户暴露在高风险产品中。在股票交易等普通业务方面，它的利润率是最低的，但随着客户涉足风险更大、更复杂的市场，比如交易衍生品或购买加密货币，它的利润率会上升。在Robinhood管理的800亿美元资产中，虽然期权和加密货币仅占17%，但超过一半的交易收入来自这些类别。
These worries have led lawmakers to question whether retail investors stand to make any gains from Robinhood. Summoned to Congress after the GameStop affair, Mr Tenev claimed that its users had earned more than $35bn in profits by buying stocks and investments, compared with what they had deposited with the broker. But Jim Himes, a congressman from Connecticut and a former banker, skewered him. “$35bn is a meaningless number unless you convert it to a rate of return so that I can compare it to Treasuries, so I can compare it to the S&P 500.” Mr Tenev deflected, claiming the right comparison was the lower bar of “not investing at all” because many of Robinhood’s customers were new to trading.
人们的担忧导致立法者质疑散户投资者是否能在Robinhood上获利。发生GameStop事件后，Tenev被传唤到了美国国会，他表示，与存入Robinhood的本金相比，其用户通过购买股票和投资赚取了逾350亿美元的利润。但来自康涅狄格州的国会议员、前银行家吉姆·海姆斯(Jim Himes)对他进行了抨击。“350亿美元是一个毫无意义的数字，除非你把它转换成收益率，这样我就可以把它与美国国债进行比较，与标准普尔500指数(S&P 500)进行比较。”Tenev转移了话题，声称正确的比较是“完全不投资”的下限，因为Robinhood的许多客户都是新手。
Whether the firm’s empowerment of retail investors has been desirable or not is more than a philosophical matter. It is also the key question that any investor in Robinhood, institutional or retail, will have to wrestle with, because it pertains to where the potential risks and rewards lie. It is also a subject on which punters and regulators seem to disagree.
该公司授权散户投资者是否可取，不仅仅是一个哲学问题。这也是Robinhood的任何投资者，无论是机构投资者还是散户投资者，都必须努力解决的关键问题，因为这关系到潜在的风险和回报所在的地方。在这个问题上，投资者和监管者似乎也存在分歧。
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