The app that made trading free, how payment for order flow works, and what it costs you.
Robinhood was founded in 2013 by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, and forced the entire US brokerage industry to drop commissions by 2019.
The trades are free to you because they are sold. Under payment for order flow, Robinhood routes your order to a market-making firm, which pays for the right to execute it. You pay nothing visible; the cost appears as a slightly worse fill than you might have received elsewhere. It is legal, disclosed, and banned in the UK and several other jurisdictions.
Retail activity, which is cyclical and concentrated in exactly the periods when markets are frothy; crypto trading volume, an unusually large share of revenue for a stock broker; and interest income on customer cash, which rises with rates and has at times exceeded trading revenue entirely.
The tokenized version trades on Solana around the clock, not only during US market hours. MarketRadar supports it directly from your own wallet — no brokerage account, no identity documents, no minimum deposit, and the position settles on-chain to your address.