I guess robinhood makes a lot of revenue from stock loan rates. Among the most widely held shares at RH are cannabis, crypto and other expensive recent IPO and glamour stocks that the smart money is betting heavily against and therefore have persistently high stock loan rates (I think, on average 50%, with occasional spikes up to 500% as mentioned on ET; look at firms like TLRY or BYND). And, unlike IB that shares this revenue with customers, RH keeps all of it. So RH might actually be profitable because of that - however I guess they won't be keen to highlight this in the IPO prospectus. "Our revenue depends on our customers continuing to buy and hold absurdly overvalued shares - which hurts their returns but allows us to loan those shares out to professional short sellers at attractive rates"
Earlier than I thought....told you it was coming. Robinhood joins a wave of fractional stock-trading offers to bring investing to the masses PUBLISHED THU, DEC 12 201910:00 AM ESTUPDATED MOMENTS AGO https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/12/robinhood-joins-a-wave-of-fractional-stock-trading-offers.html