Thanks to reader Nerna..

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by Tyler Durden
Sunday, Feb 14, 2021 - 18:17

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.

What Tenev did not say, or explain, is why his company - which is merely a client-facing front of Citadel, which buys the bulk of Robinhood's orderflow to use it perfectly legally in any way it sees fit - was so massively undercapitalized that the DTCC required several billion more in collateral to protect Robinhood's own investors against the company's predatory ways of seeking to capitalize on the gamification of investing making it nothing more (or less) than a trivial pursuit to millions of GenZ and millennial investors, a point which Michael Burry made so vividly.

Incidentally we know why Tenev did not mention it: it's because Robinhood's back office is a shambles of a shoestring operation, one which never anticipated either such a surge in trading not a multi-billion collateral requirement; had Robinhood been a true brokerage instead of pretending to be one, and run merely to open as many retail accounts as it could in the shortest amount of time, thus generating the most profit in the quickest amount of time to allow its sponsors a quick and profitable exit, it would actually have been on top of this.

It's also why Tenev's ridiculous pleas for immediate settlement instead of the usual T+2 arrangement, which has not been an issue for any other brokers, is nothing but a strawman argument which he hopes to present in Congress.

Which brings us to a totally separate topic, and one which Tenev will one way or another have to address: the fact that Robinhood is a de facto subsidiary of Robinhood, whose entire business model is to sell retail orders to a handful of HFT market makers first and foremost... Citadel. In doing so the only ones who benefited from the surge in retail trading are Robinhood itself, by pocketing millions more from selling orderflow to Citadel, Virtu, Two Sigma, Wolverine and other HFT frontrunning "market-making" venues, as well as Citadel which made billions by having an advance look at the biggest surge in retail stock and option orders flow in history, and being able to trade ahead of and around it.

Much, much more on link.