FinTech

Robinhood- Robbing the Not So Rich

Capital Markets, Investors , ,
Robinhood

There is nothing like a stock market crash to shine a light on the bad actors in the market. Many of the people who will be exposed will be out and out scam artists. Some of those scams will have been sold thorough mainstream brokerage firms that refuse to spend what it take to actually investigate what they sell.

Many more investors will lose money because the mainstream stockbrokerage firms will continue to offer investors conflicted or unsupported advice.  Investors are being told to “stay the course” and stay invested as the market is sliding to an inevitable bottom, perhaps a year away. 

Investors who lose money will file arbitration claims against their brokers to recover those losses, just as they did after the crash in 2001 and 2009. This time around they will be joined by many customers of online firms who lost money because those firms failed to operate properly. This is something that has not happened very much in almost 20 years.

Wall Street

I started on Wall Street in 1975 as the NYSE, Federal Reserve and the brokerage firms were changing over to large mainframe computers from the legacy hand written orders and record keeping.  There was a lot of skepticism at the time as to whether the computers could carry the load.  The SEC mandated that duplicate paper records be kept for several years just in case of an outage. 

The market crash in 1987 was the first significant correction where the market was wholly computerized.  Before you draw similarities between 1987 and what occurred in the markets last week, remember that the internet was still not widely accessible. The vast amount of information that is available today was not available in 1987.

The Black Monday crash was certainly exacerbated if not caused by computerized, program trading.  Program traders were using computers to analyze the data they had faster than others and then use that data to get in and out of the market before other traders caught up. As a result of Black Monday, the NYSE instituted circuit breakers which, until last week, had only been triggered once or twice since 1987.

When the market crashes, customers want to know what is going on and they want to know immediately.  This fact should not surprise anyone! Nor should it surprise anyone that securities industry regulators have always taken notice when the customers could not access their brokers or accounts.

The year 1975 was also the year that Wall Street did away with “fixed” commissions and unbundled its two primary customer services of advice and execution.  This was the birth of the discount stock brokerage firm and the DIY investor.  By 1987, Schwab and the other discount firms had millions of customers.

Stockbroker?

If you still had a stock broker on Black Monday you had someone to talk to. I know many brokers who were returning calls well into the evening on that day. If you used a discount firm, you had to go to their office to access your account and find out what was going on. Many people did just that.

There was a story that went around a day or two after the crash in 1987. When people at one of the discount brokerage houses could not get through on the telephone to place an order, they showed up, en masse at their local office. The story went that there was such a crowd of panicked customers trying to get into one office, that one of the employees was lying on the floor in the break-room in a fetal position. 

When it was all over the SEC recommended that discount firms beef up their call centers to handle the overload as trading volume was steadily increasing.  Today, most of the large discount firms have local offices supported by call centers.  Complaints that “no one picked up” are rare.  

Trading

About 10 years later, as the internet made trading from home possible, a lot of people took up the challenge and became “day traders”.  Discount firms were opening more accounts than they could handle as the computers they had maxed out.  The problem was noticeable.

Robinhood

I went to a conference to hear a representative of the SEC speak to this issue of customer capacity.  He told the crowd that “you can only fit so many people in RFK Stadium”.  His message was clear, if you don’t have the capacity to service the customers, don’t take them on.  No one in the audience was surprised.  Since 2000, complaints about lack of computer capacity have been rare as well. 

Which brings us to Robinhood Financial, a brokerage firm that claims 10 million distinct customers. Many of its customers are younger, first time investors. 

Robinhood

Robinhood’s site crashed multiple times last week, as the market see-sawed and volume grew. Individual customers were locked out of their accounts during several periods of exceptional volatility.   If you cannot access your account you are not going to be able to lock in gains or avoid losses. You are likely to lose money that you did not intend to lose. 

Apparently no one told the owners of Robinhood that this is not supposed to happen.  They were not part of the brokerage industry in 1987 or in the late 1990s as the industry heeded the regulators’ advice and bolstered their systems and capacity. 

In point of fact it appears the owners of Robinhood have no real experience operating a brokerage firm. They are techies by training and experience and apparently not very good ones.

Robinhood’s website boasts the following: “We are a team of engineers and designers, and we hold the products we craft to the highest standard. We believe that exceptionally engineered systems — not marble office buildings on Wall St — are the cornerstones of establishing trust.”  If you want an example of false advertising, there it is.

Robinhood Financial, like all brokerage firms is a member of FINRA.  It says so right in the fine print on the bottom of its website.  With membership in FINRA should come an understanding that all customers will have access and the ability to place trades in their account whenever the market is open. 

Also in the fine print is this disclaimer:  “Investors should be aware that system response, execution price, speed, liquidity, market data, and account access times are affected by many factors, including market volatility, size and type of order, market conditions, system performance, and other factors.”

Being a member of FINRA and disclosing that your system can be “affected” by a variety of extraneous factors should be mutually exclusive.  System failures are not acceptable in the brokerage industry any more than a software glitch would be acceptable in the operating system of a heart/lung machine. 

Robinhood has previously demonstrated that its management does not understand the stockbrokerage business that it operates in. At the end of 2018, Robinhood announced that it would launch “checking and savings account” that would be covered by SIPC insurance, except that it wasn’t.  The account was supposed to pay out substantially more than any bank savings account except it was never disclosed where that extra income would come from.

No professional brokerage industry compliance officer would have allowed that product to get close to launching. Apparently, no professional compliance officer works at Robinhood Financial.

More recently, FINRA fined Robinhood for directing its customers’ orders only to firms that paid Robinhood for the order flow. FINRA allows for the payments, but it requires the firm to direct the orders to those firms that give customers the best execution price.

FINRA noted that Robinhood’s systems were not set up to follow this basic industry wide rule. FINRA fined Robinhood $1.25 million. All of this begs the question, what other basic industry rules don’t they follow.

Robinhood’s claim to fame is that it does not charge any commission to its customers.   Robinhood executes through a clearing firm and there is no indication that that firm is not charging Robinhood for each trade. It is also clear that the clearing firm did not break down last week. All the problems noted were with Robinhood’s system.

Robinhood has taken in over $900 million from VC investors.  That VC funding allows Robinhood to claim a “valuation” of over $7 billion.  I suspect that some of that money is going to pay for clearing those trades.

Seriously, can a stockbrokerage firm be worth over $7 billion if all it has is software and that software does not work up to industry standards? Can it ever be profitable if it charges it customers nothing? Any profit it might have derived from financing margin loans likely vanished last week as most of those loans were certainly called as the market crashed.

Maybe next time Robinhood’s system will be down for a week or longer.  In a fast moving market the losses could be in the billions. Some regulator needs to look behind the curtain here before 10 million angry customers start calling their Congressperson screaming. At that point it can get really ugly. 

Fintech has become a buzz word for technology that makes the customer experience in finance better and cheaper. VCs pumped $900 million into Robinhood and came out with product that is clearly defective. Technology can improve a lot of things, but applying it to a regulated industry you know nothing about is a recipe for failure and a colossal waste of money.  

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Is Technology Changing Finance?

Capital Markets, Economics , , , , , , ,

A lot of people seem to believe that technology will fundamentally change or disrupt finance and the financial markets.  Many, if not most, of those people seem to be developing technology, selling it or using it to sell products to investors and financial consumers.  Most of these people seem to have degrees or backgrounds in technology not finance.

Having a background in technology does not give you an understanding of finance or the financial markets.  You cannot fix or disrupt what you do not understand and the lack of understanding behind many of these products is simply ridiculous.

I only write about the law and the financial markets. I spent my career as an attorney working in and around the financial markets. I also taught Economics and Finance so I have a pretty well rounded idea about how the capital markets work and how they are evolving.

So I feel perfectly justified to call out the many techies who think they understand the financial markets even though they have never worked in the markets or studied finance. Nonetheless many seem hell-bent to create products that they think are making these markets better and are quick to label the products that they sell as “disruptive”.

I call these people the “algorithms fix everything” crowd.  It is an interesting thought, except that these mathematicians have no math to back up much of what they say about finance.

At the same time, there is an ongoing narrative that suggests that everyone who works in the financial markets is evil. I find it amazing how many people actually think that all bankers and stock brokers get up in the morning thinking “who can I screw today?”  I have personally brought more than 1000 claims on behalf of aggrieved investors against Wall Street firms and written a book about some of the really bad things that Wall Street firms can do, but even I know that Wall Street firms are not evil.

The capital markets handle millions of transactions every day involving trillions of dollars and the almost all of those transactions settle with both the buyer and seller happy. Banks and stockbrokers fund schools, universities, roads and hospitals and virtually every company since WWII, again without serious problems or complaints from anyone. Banks aggregate and intermediate capital and over all they do it quite well.  So what, exactly, needs disrupting?

Still there is a never ending stream of new products and services which claim to be revolutionary and which promise to disrupt the capital markets. On closer examination many of these innovations are more hype than substance. Say what you will, there is nothing disruptive here.  A few examples for your consideration:

1) Algorithmic stock trading – This is a good place to start because it is pure technology applied to the existing markets. “Quant” traders use computers to evaluate trends and trading patterns in the market of various securities. They attempt to anticipate the price at which the next trade or subsequent trades will occur.  Logic says that computers should be able to take in more information that is pertinent to stock trading, analyze it almost instantaneously and execute transactions in micro seconds.

It sounds right, but the reality is that all stock trading is binary; every buyer requires a seller. No one buys a stock unless they believe that the price will appreciate; sellers generally will only sell shares when they think the price will appreciate no further. Both sides to any trade cannot be correct.

Analyzing the information or executing faster is of no use unless each trade you make is profitable.  No one has yet figured out how to accomplish that, nor are they likely to do so.  What we are talking about is predicting the future which is difficult to do even if only a micro-second or two ahead.   And please do not suggest that artificial intelligence will change this.  If there is one right answer based on the current information, e.g. buy APPL, then who is going to sell it?

2) Robo investment advisors- These are similar but much less sophisticated. Robo-advisors do not actually attempt to anticipate future market performance. They make investment recommendations based solely on the past performance of the markets. Anyone who has ever bought a mutual fund is required by law to be told that past performance is not a basis for future results. But that is all you get with a robo-advisor.

FINRA did a study of a half dozen robo investment platforms and found that they provided widely divergent portfolios for the same types of investors. No robo is any better than any other and none is really worth anything.

3) Crypto currency- It was a discussion about Bitcoins that was the initial impetus for this article. Aficionados of crypto currency actually think that they are developing an alternative currency for an alternative financial system. People seem to want to just print their own money and on one level I can understand that.  But that level is more of a fantasy than reality.

The reality is that I can buy food or virtually anything else in most places in the world with US currency. Why do we need Bitcoins? What exactly, is their utility?   When I ask that question I get any number of weak responses. More often than not, I get a tirade about banks and/or governments being evil.

What proponents of crypto currencies never want to face is the fact that the crypto currency market has been full of people laundering money from illegal activities.  The banks that crypto currency fans love to hate are required by law to know their customers and have systems in place to prevent money laundering.  It costs money to follow the law and have those systems. It is money that the crypto currency platforms do not want to spend. If there is a common thread in the crypto currency world, it is that people want to skirt or simply ignore the regulations that keep the markets safe and functioning.

4)  Crowdfunding Platforms- Crowdfunding clearly works and works well as evidenced by the significant amount of money that it has raised for real estate and real estate development projects.  At the same time the crowdfunding industry is populated by a great many people who fall into the “I do not care what the rules say, I am in this to make a buck” crowd.  I have written several articles about how some of the crowdfunding platforms do not take the time to properly verify the facts that they give to potential investors.  Due diligence can be expensive and some of the platforms just refuse to spend what it takes to do it correctly.

Crowdfunding replaces the role that stockbrokers typically fulfill in the process of raising capital with a website and do it yourself approach.  With a stockbroker, the company that was seeking capital got that money the vast majority of the time because the brokers were incentivized to sell the shares. With crowdfunding it is very much hit or miss whether the company will get funded. Many of the better crowdfunding platforms charge close to what a brokerage firm would charge and the investors get none of the protections or insurance that they would get with a stockbroker.

5) FinTech and FinApps – I can go to my bank’s website and send a payment to my electric utility company. I can do the same at the utility company’s website. I admit that it is convenient, but it is hardly disruptive.   Remittance companies like PayPal merely move money from my bank to a vendor’s bank.  And PayPal posted a $3 billion profit in the last fiscal quarter.  So they may charge less of a fee per transaction than a bank, but is not essentially different, and again while PayPal holds my money, I get no insurance against hacking or theft.

Apps that allow me to apply for a mortgage on my phone are really doing no more than eliminating a bank employee who would enter the same information from a written application into the bank’s computer. Again, it is convenient but not necessary.  And the money for the mortgage comes from either a bank or stock brokerage firm so there is nothing disruptive here, either.

Is there nothing truly new and disruptive in finance? Of course there is. They deservedly gave the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics to Muhammad Yunus for developing a system of micro-finance that continues to create millions of entrepreneurs and lift millions more out of poverty. I doubt that one line of computer code was needed.

Micro-finance has the ability to put globalization on steroids.  Who will be disrupted?  Quite of few people with big school pedigrees and enormous student debt who write code to disrupt finance but who never understood finance in the first place.to