<story><title>Stock trade app Robinhood raising at $5B+, up 4X in a year</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/15/robinhood-quintacorn/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fizzledbits</author><text>Robinhood gets their revenue from margin interest lending to people who can&amp;#x27;t afford to invest but do it anyways. And also from selling the trading data to high frequency traders to front-run the Robinhood traders. The top guys at Robinhood all have HFT background and connections.&lt;p&gt;Their pr message is priceless but a sham. The users are the real product, with all that we know goes with that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Judson</author><text>I thought they stopped selling order flow, but was wrong. For those interested, here is their Q4 2017 606 Filing w&amp;#x2F; the SEC:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;d2ue93q3u507c2.cloudfront.net&amp;#x2F;assets&amp;#x2F;robinhood&amp;#x2F;legal&amp;#x2F;RHF%20PFO%20Disclosure.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;d2ue93q3u507c2.cloudfront.net&amp;#x2F;assets&amp;#x2F;robinhood&amp;#x2F;legal...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Stock trade app Robinhood raising at $5B+, up 4X in a year</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/15/robinhood-quintacorn/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fizzledbits</author><text>Robinhood gets their revenue from margin interest lending to people who can&amp;#x27;t afford to invest but do it anyways. And also from selling the trading data to high frequency traders to front-run the Robinhood traders. The top guys at Robinhood all have HFT background and connections.&lt;p&gt;Their pr message is priceless but a sham. The users are the real product, with all that we know goes with that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>godzillabrennus</author><text>Sounds like they engineered a fantastic business model.&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong?  Is there downside for the typical consumer in all of this?</text></comment>