Robinhood’s Role in the ‘Gamification’ of Investing: QuickTake
Robinhood’s Role in the ‘Gamification’ of Investing: QuickTake
With its playful interface, online brokerage Robinhood Markets Inc. has brought a new class of U.S. traders into the market, raising concerns about the “gamification” of investing. Some say Robinhood and other platforms that have turned investing into an online social activity are making it too easy, and too fun, to wager money on stocks and more complicated investments . Regulators are weighing whether such practices belong in the financial realm.
1. How is Robinhood different? Its core offering — stock trading on a fun, game-like phone app — is controversial and has become widely imitated. Founded in 2013, Robinhood courted long-ignored small-dollar and novice investors by charging zero commissions on trades. It later offered fractional stocks that allow people who can’t afford, say, the almost $3,200 price of a single Amazon.com Inc. share to buy just a piece of one instead. None of that is unusual anymore: Free trading is now the industry standard, and retail brokerage Charles Schwab Corp. made “stock slices” available in June.
2. How is it fun? A product of the smartphone era, Robinhood offers a trading experience with social interaction seeped into its DNA. Investors are congratulated for their first trade with a confetti animation. They’re offered a (tiny) chance of snagging a share of a high-price glamour stock such as Apple Inc. if they get a friend to sign up. They can browse the 100 most-held stocks among fellow users for inspiration. An entertainment ecosystem has risen up alongside Robinhood; TikTok videos under #robinhoodstocks have millions of views. In some ways, Robinhood reflects how Silicon Valley mastered the art of manufacturing behavioral loops, encouraging an app user to log back in one more time or spend one more minute engaged. A Chinese competitor, Webull, has become one of the fastest-growing retail trading platforms in the U.S. partly by following the Robinhood model of offering free stock trades with a slick online interface, while also offering the live customer-service hotline that some Robinhood users have asked for .
3. What do other platforms do? Outside the U.S., other online trading platforms are pushing forward with what’s known as social trading. The Israeli-British firm eToro lets customers see each other’s portfolios and provides a chat function that lets them talk to one another about stocks, Bitcoin, or conditions in the markets. EToro, which has more than 15 million registered users and is licensed to enter the U.S. market next year, is also big on copy-trading. Under this practice, it designates the top performing amateur traders on its site as “Popular Investors” and lets other customers copy their trades with simple tap on their smart phone s. EToro pays Popular Investors up to 2.5% of the value of the assets that follow them, in a sense making them de facto money managers.
4. What’s the problem? Massachusetts securities regulators on Dec. 16 filed a complaint against Robinhood, calling out its “gamification” tactics. A day later, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission fined Robinhood $65 million for concealing from customers that, from 2015 to 2018, its biggest source of revenue was sending orders to high-speed trading firms. (As part of a settlement, Robinhood didn’t admit or deny the SEC claim.) Academic research has shown that self-guided investors do worse the more actively they trade. It’s true that most of those studies were done before the death of brokerage commissions, a major drag on traders’ performance. On the other hand, markets have gotten faster and more competitive, meaning anyone trading from a phone app is trying to outwit increasingly sophisticated pros on the other side of the bet.
5. Isn’t encouraging more investment a good thing? That’s one argument offered by Robinhood and its supporters. “Those who dismiss new and younger investors, who come from increasingly diverse backgrounds, as unsophisticated or unserious perpetuate the myth that investing is only for the wealthy,” a company spokesperson said in response to the Massachusetts complaint. Even the concept of “gamification” has had its admirers. A 2018 Ernst & Young analysis said that adding game-like aspects to financial services could help reach users who might otherwise feel reluctant to try investing. “Gamification could be invaluable in educating clients,” it said. A 2017 “The Future of Financial Services” brochure on the website of business consultant WillisTowers Watson Plc says that adopting the game-like elements of exercise apps like Fitbit or of loyalty point programs like those of airlines “may be one way for asset managers to engage and educate future investors.”
6. How much new money are these platforms bringing into the market? Because many of these platforms are privately held it’s hard to ascertain precisely how much money is flowing into them. But there is evidence that 2020 has been a banner year for inflows across the industry. EToro says it’s recorded more than $1 trillion worth of trades on its platform in 2020.
The Reference Shelf A Bloomberg News primer on the blistering rise of retail trading . Robinhood’s “About Us” page . A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper found that the typical Robinhood user’s portfolio is pretty boring . A look at eToro’s devoted following . How Robinhood’s addictive app made trading a pandemic pastime . Robinhood is democratizing markets for the masses, Aaron Brown writes in Bloomberg Opinion.
