It looks like the Robinhood business model was to steal from the poor via front-running, which “gave” to very rich Citadel and Ken Griffin. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
Frankly, we’ve had it with the constant stream of lies from Robinhood and neverending bullshit from the company’s CEO, Vlad Tenev.
With Tenev scheduled to testify on Thursday, alongside the CEOs of Citadel, Melvin Capital and Reddit, the apriori mea culpas have started to emerge – if a little too late – the former HFT trader spoke late on Friday on the All-In Podcast hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, who had strongly criticized Robinhood over the trading restrictions, and Jason Calacanis, a Robinhood investor, and said that “no doubt we could have communicated this a little bit better to customers.”
What he is referring to, of course, is Robinhood’s outrageous decision to restrict the buying of 13 heavily shorted stocks on Jan 28 that had been driven to record highs, including GameStop, whose shares had surged more than 1,600%.
Tenev said the restrictions were necessary due to a large increase in collateral/deposit requirements by the DTCC, but that was not spelled out in automated emails sent to Robinhood customers early on Jan. 28.
And then he decided to pull the oldest trick and deflect attention from his own mistakes by blaming “conspiracy theories.”
“As soon as those emails went out, the conspiracy theories started coming, so my phone was blowing up with, ‘how could you do this, how could you be on the side of the hedge funds,’” he said.
