Robinhood Ends Its Popularity Contest
Also Kodak, the Business Roundtable, tax-loss carrybacks, antitrust and psychics.
A reader once said to me that Robinhood, the retail brokerage for young people trading on their phones, “is one giant momentum algo.” If you are bored during a coronavirus lockdown and you can’t go to a casino or bet on sports, you might decide to start gambling on stocks instead. If you decide to start gambling on stocks you might download Robinhood, which is, stereotypically, the app for gambling on stocks.
If you download Robinhood … then what? You have heard that it might be fun to gamble on stocks, but you do not necessarily know which stocks are fun to gamble on. There are a lot of stocks and they all, from inside an app, look kind of the same. What is the stock discovery mechanism? If you walk into a casino, the layout of the casino will tell you what to gamble on: There are slot machines right in front of you with blinking lights, there are people shouting around the craps tables, etc.