[adambratt]

Robinhood is just a marketing play. Anything about them selling flow or using margin offerings to become profitable is not realistic.

Traditional brokerages have a customer acquisition cost of around $400 to get someone to deposit at least $100 in an account.

They've got a million users and continue to grow quicker and quicker. For a small multiple of traditional CAC they are already close to their >$1B valuation just in terms of user acquisition.

It's not easy to get funded brokerage accounts, especially funded accounts by millennials. Their current user base might not be worth much, but the average age of a brokerage account in the US is over 20 years. That means that Robinhood's AUM is only going to grow as their user base gets older and has more money.

Frankly, the current brokerage houses have been dumping hundreds of millions into marketing to try to acquire millennial users without a ton of success. TD Ameritrade alone spent $300 million last year in ads, a lot of that targeted at the millennial market.

Robinhood is a user acquisition strategy for the millennial market and they'll get bought for $2-3 billion within a couple years by one of the existing brokerage houses.

[dublidu]

Robinhood's average account size is much smaller than the traditional brokerages, so they're not making much (if any) per client. I don't know if waiting for your clients to get rich is a viable strategy these days because these clients might jump to better options in the future.

[adambratt]

They don't need to wait for the clients to get rich. Fidelity or Schwabb will buy them and then start to upsell the Robinhood users into other financial programs.

[pbreit]

Financial services is the easiest business to make money =IF= you can get customers.

[sebleon]

Very interesting breakdown, makes a lot of sense... thanks for sharing!

[arcticfox]

What do they do to make money once they have their users on board?

[selectodude]

They really do sell flow and use margin. There just isn't any way they're profitable doing just that.

[huntermeyer]

They earn interest in the uninvested funds in user accounts.

[kobeya]

They offer margin and after hours trading for a price.