4 ms·

Sure, but also, none of my (investing) friends use Tastyworks, and almost all of them are using RH as their primary investing platform! Companies in hyper-grow

Sure, but also, none of my (investing) friends use Tastyworks, and almost all of them are using RH as their primary investing platform! Companies in hyper-growth stages may hire/fire differently than others.

outworlder 4y ago
> as their primary investing platform :%s/investing/speculation/g Very few people use RH as 'investing'. Those will be on boring brokers like Vanguard. I have a Tastyworks account too - the fills are way better than Robinhood's. As expected, since they charge some amount per trade. But that means that the "free" platform will definitely have more users, just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in the fills, and get frontrunning trades)
- kasey_junk 4y ago
  How are you quantifying that the fills are better? I worked professionally on this problem a while ago and it was very hard to do even with full depth feeds direct from the exchanges.
  - sitzkrieg 4y ago
    price and execution time? how much slip or price improvement on limits? or god forbid the casual retail market orders fill vs nbbo and pools at exec
    - kasey_junk 4y ago
      If you are seeing a venue not meeting nbbo you have a whistleblower suit to make which have been quite lucrative. When I was doing this for work the issues we ran into came down to a) making the orders hit the tape close enough to ensure similar priority b) the size of the orders changing execution depending on venue c) differences in performance per symbol. This was in a place that was sending a fair amount of orders in. Even then given the above finding statistical relevance was hard.
  - 0x457 4y ago
    I don't know the situation now, but both used to sell their order flow to the same place. I used both and fills for pretty much the same. However, I used tasty platform to set up options and then execute them on RH most of the time.
- bostonpete 4y ago
  Wow, TIL you can use sed syntax in vi. I'm not a heavy vi user but that's still a handy trick. :-)
  - acuozzo 4y ago
    It comes from ex (the line editor sitting beneath vi).
- gruez 4y ago
  >just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in the fills, and get frontrunning trades) Can you provide a source for this? Citadel (one of the companies robinhood sells order flow to) claims in regulatory filings[1] that the overwhelming majority of orders are executed at market price or better, and that they on average save traders money. [1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/citadel-wordpress-prd101/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/09175131/FIF-Rule-605-606-WG-CitadelSecurities_Retail-Execution-Quality-Stats_Q1_2019.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/citadel-wordpress-prd101/wp-content...
  - qaq 4y ago
    Wha the point of paying for order flow if you "execute at market price or better"? Are you suggesting Citadel is a charity?
    - gruez 4y ago
      >Wha the point of paying for order flow if you "execute at market price or better"? https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-05/robinhood-gamestop-saga-pressures-payment-for-order-flow https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-05/robinh... tl;dr: adverse selection. retail traders are less risky to deal with, so market makers can offer better prices to them. >If the retail trades are random. If retail traders usually buy before the stock goes up, and sell before the stock goes down, the wholesaler would consistently lose money on price risk. (This is called “adverse selection.”) But they don’t. Even now, retail traders tend to be small, dispersed and uninformed. If you sell stock to a retail trader for $58.15, you have no particular reason to think it will go up (or down). The retail traders are trading randomly, which is what allows you to treat this problem as though you were matching them up with each other at a fixed price and collecting a spread. In reality you are matching them up with each other over time, not simultaneously, and the price moves while you are doing it, but the randomness of their trading means that this difference doesn’t matter too much. >Meanwhile market makers on the public exchange are doing something similar, but with institutional traders who tend to be informed and trade large lots of stock, so their trading does carry a lot more risk of adverse selection. If a big institution buys some stock, that does mean the stock is somewhat more likely to go up, so if you sell them the stock you are somewhat more likely to lose money. This is why the spread on the public exchange—the difference between the $58 best bid to buy the stock and the $58.25 best offer to sell the stock—is so much wider than the 5 cents that the wholesaler charges. The wholesaler is just matching up small pleasant random orders and clipping a spread; the stock-exchange market maker is facing a real risk of being run over by an informed trader.
xoxodave 4y ago
Tastyworks was founded by the founders, CTO, and CFO of Thinkorswim. I worked on thinkorswim institutional desk for several years back in the mid-2000s. Not great brand recognition but a company built for traders by traders.
- throwaway_1928 4y ago
- bombcar 4y ago
  Isn’t thinkorswim just an arm of TDAmeritrade now?
  - AviationAtom 4y ago
    And now a part of Charles Schwab Gobble-gobble, the sound of consolidation.
ab_testing 4y ago
Does that matter with brokerages. I don’t know if Robinhood has a chat feature that lets you chat with your friends while trading.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Customers matter for businesses, and they matter for businesses in winner take all marketplaces which has been the focus of VCs the last 10 years.

outworlder 4y ago

> as their primary investing platform :%s/investing/speculation/g Very few people use RH as 'investing'. Those will be on boring brokers like Vanguard. I have a Tastyworks account too - the fills are way better than Robinhood's. As expected, since they charge some amount per trade. But that means that the "free" platform will definitely have more users, just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in the fills, and get frontrunning trades)

kasey_junk 4y ago
How are you quantifying that the fills are better? I worked professionally on this problem a while ago and it was very hard to do even with full depth feeds direct from the exchanges.
- sitzkrieg 4y ago
  price and execution time? how much slip or price improvement on limits? or god forbid the casual retail market orders fill vs nbbo and pools at exec
  - kasey_junk 4y ago
    If you are seeing a venue not meeting nbbo you have a whistleblower suit to make which have been quite lucrative. When I was doing this for work the issues we ran into came down to a) making the orders hit the tape close enough to ensure similar priority b) the size of the orders changing execution depending on venue c) differences in performance per symbol. This was in a place that was sending a fair amount of orders in. Even then given the above finding statistical relevance was hard.
- 0x457 4y ago
  I don't know the situation now, but both used to sell their order flow to the same place. I used both and fills for pretty much the same. However, I used tasty platform to set up options and then execute them on RH most of the time.
bostonpete 4y ago
Wow, TIL you can use sed syntax in vi. I'm not a heavy vi user but that's still a handy trick. :-)
- acuozzo 4y ago
  It comes from ex (the line editor sitting beneath vi).
gruez 4y ago
>just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in the fills, and get frontrunning trades) Can you provide a source for this? Citadel (one of the companies robinhood sells order flow to) claims in regulatory filings[1] that the overwhelming majority of orders are executed at market price or better, and that they on average save traders money. [1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/citadel-wordpress-prd101/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/09175131/FIF-Rule-605-606-WG-CitadelSecurities_Retail-Execution-Quality-Stats_Q1_2019.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/citadel-wordpress-prd101/wp-content...
- qaq 4y ago
  Wha the point of paying for order flow if you "execute at market price or better"? Are you suggesting Citadel is a charity?
  - gruez 4y ago
    >Wha the point of paying for order flow if you "execute at market price or better"? https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-05/robinhood-gamestop-saga-pressures-payment-for-order-flow https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-05/robinh... tl;dr: adverse selection. retail traders are less risky to deal with, so market makers can offer better prices to them. >If the retail trades are random. If retail traders usually buy before the stock goes up, and sell before the stock goes down, the wholesaler would consistently lose money on price risk. (This is called “adverse selection.”) But they don’t. Even now, retail traders tend to be small, dispersed and uninformed. If you sell stock to a retail trader for $58.15, you have no particular reason to think it will go up (or down). The retail traders are trading randomly, which is what allows you to treat this problem as though you were matching them up with each other at a fixed price and collecting a spread. In reality you are matching them up with each other over time, not simultaneously, and the price moves while you are doing it, but the randomness of their trading means that this difference doesn’t matter too much. >Meanwhile market makers on the public exchange are doing something similar, but with institutional traders who tend to be informed and trade large lots of stock, so their trading does carry a lot more risk of adverse selection. If a big institution buys some stock, that does mean the stock is somewhat more likely to go up, so if you sell them the stock you are somewhat more likely to lose money. This is why the spread on the public exchange—the difference between the $58 best bid to buy the stock and the $58.25 best offer to sell the stock—is so much wider than the 5 cents that the wholesaler charges. The wholesaler is just matching up small pleasant random orders and clipping a spread; the stock-exchange market maker is facing a real risk of being run over by an informed trader.

xoxodave 4y ago

Tastyworks was founded by the founders, CTO, and CFO of Thinkorswim. I worked on thinkorswim institutional desk for several years back in the mid-2000s. Not great brand recognition but a company built for traders by traders.

throwaway_1928 4y ago
bombcar 4y ago
Isn’t thinkorswim just an arm of TDAmeritrade now?
- AviationAtom 4y ago
  And now a part of Charles Schwab Gobble-gobble, the sound of consolidation.

ab_testing 4y ago

Does that matter with brokerages. I don’t know if Robinhood has a chat feature that lets you chat with your friends while trading.

fullshark 4y ago
Customers matter for businesses, and they matter for businesses in winner take all marketplaces which has been the focus of VCs the last 10 years.