Robinhood has quickly become one of the hottest fintechs in the world during the pandemic as they added more than three million funded accounts from January through April; with more than 13 million users now using the platform can they build a sustainable business given they make no money on commissions?; the company does earn money from trading through rebates from wholesale market-makers which made them $90mn in Q1; they have also recently added a cash account and debit card, alongside building out their infrastructure to help generate more revenue from lending shares; large retail trading volumes have historically shown themselves to be short lived with Schwab not seeing the same volume for seven years after the dot-com bust; their technology is remarkably easy to use and very user friendly; venture investors have put their trust in the company to answer the monetization question, or at least continue to scale. The Wall Street Journal.
