- Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer Starring in ‘The Death of Robin Hood’ Variety
- Hugh Jackman & Jodie Comer To Star In Robin Hood Reimagining ‘The Death Of Robin Hood’ For ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Director Michael Sarnoski — Cannes Market Hot Project Deadline
- Wolverine Star Hugh Jackman Will Play a Battle-Worn Robin Hood Grappling With His Life of Crime in New Movie IGN
- Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer Cast in ROBIN HOOD Reimagining BroadwayWorld
- Hugh Jackman & Jodie Comer to Headline The Death of Robin Hood Movie Yahoo Entertainment
Tag Archives: hood
Chicago shooting near me: Carlishia Hood files lawsuit after charges against her, son, dropped in West Pullman restaurant shooting – WLS-TV
- Chicago shooting near me: Carlishia Hood files lawsuit after charges against her, son, dropped in West Pullman restaurant shooting WLS-TV
- Chicago mother sues city after murder charges were dropped against her and her son Yahoo News
- 14-year-old kills man at fast food restaurant on mom’s orders, Illinois officials say Kansas City Star
- Chicago cops falsely arrested mom, 14-year-old son in shooting at hot dog stand, lawsuit claims, after murder charges dropped Chicago Sun-Times
- Carlishia Hood sues city after charges dropped against her and son CBS Chicago
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Cannes 2023: Yes, That’s Aishwarya Rai Bachchan In A Giant Silver Hood – See OTT Outfit – NDTV Movies
- Cannes 2023: Yes, That’s Aishwarya Rai Bachchan In A Giant Silver Hood – See OTT Outfit NDTV Movies
- It’s all good in the hood as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan makes a case for hooded gowns Lifestyle Asia India
- Aishwarya Rai Wore Sophie Couture To The ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ Cannes Film Festival Premiere Red Carpet Fashion Awards
- Cannes 2023: Aishwarya Rai Ups The Drama Quotient In A Silver Sequin Hooded Gown With An Oversized Bow NDTV Swirlster
- Aishwarya Rai Bachchan stuns in a shimmery green outfit in her first look from Cannes 2023; fans are in a Indiatimes.com
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Brendan Fraser Disses Golden Globes as ‘Hood Ornaments’ That ‘Mean Nothing to Me’: ‘I Don’t Want It. I Didn’t Ask to Be Considered Even’ – Variety
- Brendan Fraser Disses Golden Globes as ‘Hood Ornaments’ That ‘Mean Nothing to Me’: ‘I Don’t Want It. I Didn’t Ask to Be Considered Even’ Variety
- How Long It Took Brendan Fraser to Get His Role in “The Whale” The Howard Stern Show
- Brendan Fraser Gets Emotional as He Talks About Son with Autism: ‘Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way’ PEOPLE
- Brendan Fraser on Filming “Airheads” With Adam Sandler and Chris Farley The Howard Stern Show
- Brendan Frasier was ‘crestfallen’ when son was diagnosed with autism Page Six
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Robinhood Lays Off 23% of Staff as Retail Investors Fade from Platform
Robinhood Markets Inc.
HOOD 2.10%
is slashing about 23% of its full-time staff as the flashy online brokerage continues to reel from a sharp slowdown in customer trading activity.
The job cuts mark the second round of layoffs this year at Robinhood, which in April reduced its staff by about 9%. Together, the two rounds have cut more than 1,000 jobs from the company.
The layoffs come alongside a broader company reorganization,
Vlad Tenev,
Robinhood’s chief executive, said in a message posted to the company’s blog. In the statement, Mr. Tenev said the previous round of layoffs in April “did not go far enough” in helping the company cut costs.
“Last year, we staffed many of our operations functions under the assumption that the heightened retail engagement we had been seeing with the stock and crypto markets in the Covid era would persist into 2022,” Mr. Tenev said in the message. “In this new environment, we are operating with more staffing than appropriate. As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on me.”
Robinhood also moved up the release of its second-quarter results a day earlier than scheduled, reporting its monthly active users tumbled to 14 million, down 34% from a year earlier. Revenue fell 44% to $318 million.
Launched less than a decade ago, Robinhood ushered in a free-stock trading phenomenon during the Covid-19 pandemic, thanks to its easy-to-use, mobile-first online brokerage platform.
By the second quarter of last year—Robinhood’s best, according to public filings—the company boasted more than 21 million active users, who flocked to the app to trade flashy meme stocks, options and cryptocurrencies.
But the pandemic-darling has seen its fortunes unwind this year as markets have tumbled and customers are no longer stuck at home like they were during the Covid-19 pandemic. Revenue tied to customers’ trading activity dropped 55% in the latest quarter to $202 million.
Robinhood’s stock price plunged this year and finished Tuesday at $9.23, down 76% from its initial public offering price last year of $38 a share. Its stock fell 1.6% in recent after-hours trading.
Robinhood scaled up staffing quickly during the Covid-19 pandemic to meet the surge in demand for its services. On the company’s earnings call in April, Mr. Tenev said the company grew its head count to nearly 3,900 in the first quarter of this year from roughly 700 at the end of 2019. Tuesday’s reduction will bring the head count to about 2,600.
In his blog post, Mr. Tenev said all employees would receive an email and a Slack message with their employment status immediately following Tuesday’s companywide meeting where the layoffs were announced. Employees who were laid off will be able to remain employed through October, Mr. Tenev said.
“The reality is that we over-hired, in particular in some of our support functions,” Mr. Tenev said later on the call with reporters. He noted that employees in support, operations, marketing and program management would be most acutely affected.
A number of technology companies have laid off employees in recent months as they grapple with a slowdown in growth and the threat of a looming recession.
Twitter Inc.,
Netflix Inc.
and
Tesla Inc.
are among those that have made staff cuts.
Within the brokerage landscape, Robinhood has found itself more deeply affected by the current market environment. Compared with larger, entrenched players in the industry, Robinhood’s users tend to be younger and have less money in their brokerage accounts. Jason Warnick, Robinhood’s chief financial officer, said Robinhood customers tend to invest in growth stocks and cryptocurrencies. Both categories were hammered by a downturn in markets this year.
In addition to slowing growth, Robinhood has found itself under the watchful eye of regulators. The New York State Department of Financial Services said Tuesday that it imposed a $30 million fine on Robinhood’s cryptocurrency trading unit for alleged violations of anti-money-laundering and cybersecurity regulations.
The company, meanwhile, has encountered questions about the future viability of part of its business model, after Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Gary Gensler
earlier this year outlined a revamp of trading rules that could threaten one of the key ways Robinhood makes money.
As its business has struggled this year, Robinhood has increasingly been considered a takeover target by some market watchers, especially in the highly competitive brokerage industry. In May, one of the biggest names in cryptocurrency,
Sam Bankman
-Fried, unveiled a roughly $648 million investment in Robinhood in exchange for 7.6% of the company’s Class A shares.
Any outside investor, including Mr. Bankman-Fried, would face an uphill battle in mounting an aggressive takeover bid for Robinhood, due to a dual-class share structure that gives the majority of voting control to Mr. Tenev and
Baiju Bhatt,
Robinhood’s other co-founder.
Mr. Warnick reiterated on Tuesday’s media call that Robinhood intends to continue as a stand-alone, independent company.
“We’ve got an incredibly strong balance sheet with $6 billion in cash and we’ve got a lot of momentum on the product side,” he said. “To the contrary of being acquired, we actually think that we should be looking more aggressively at opportunities to acquire other companies that would help speed our innovation.”
Mr. Warnick added that Robinhood plans to roll out tax-advantaged retirement accounts later this year, following its earlier launch of other products including a new debit card. Some former employees, customers and analysts, however, have criticized the brokerage for being too slow to unveil new products that could diversify its revenue stream.
Write to Caitlin McCabe at caitlin.mccabe@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Employees Scrambled to Keep Robinhood Afloat in January 2021 Meme-Stock Frenzy, House Report Finds
Robinhood Markets struggled to handle huge volumes of stock trading and sparred with its principal customer, market maker Citadel Securities, during the week in January 2021 when meme stocks exploded, according to a report from the Democratic staff of the House Financial Services Committee.
The committee held hearings in February 2021, questioning the chief executives of Robinhood and Citadel Securities, as well as meme-stock hero Keith Gill and Gabe Plotkin, the hedge-fund manager who lost billions betting against GameStop and other hot stocks. The staff reviewed tens of thousands of pages of internal documents, including pointed communications inside and between the companies.
Stocks Pull Back After Last Week’s Rally
U.S. stocks fell on Tuesday, poised to end the month on a downbeat note after last week’s rally.
The S&P 500 was down 0.4% in afternoon trading, a day after U.S. markets were closed for Memorial Day. After snapping a seven-week losing streak last week, the benchmark index regained ground and was on track to close the month with a slight gain. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 0.5%, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 0.1%.
Tuesday’s session will cap another volatile trading month, during which stocks around the world swung wildly as traders tried to assess the outlook for global economies. In the U.S., stocks tumbled shortly after May began and continued falling amid a slew of earnings and economic data that came in worse than expected.
Throughout the month, profit warnings from companies ranging from
Snap
to
Target
intensified worries about the lingering impact of inflation, and spurred investors to dump shares across several industries.
By mid-May, it seemed the S&P 500 was bound to close in a bear market, defined as a drop of 20% or more from a recent high, before a late-month rally sent stocks higher. The S&P 500 is down about 14% from its January high.
Professional and individual investors alike waded into last week’s rally in the U.S. markets, finding opportunities to scoop up stocks that have seen their valuations fall. However, the issues that sent stocks declining earlier this month have yet to abate.
Many traders remain worried that the Federal Reserve’s plans to raise interest rates aggressively could tip the U.S. economy into a recession. Meanwhile, concerns about an economic slowdown in China and sustained supply-chain disruptions due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have continued to weigh on investors’ minds.
“There’s a bit of market uncertainty just about the pretty rapid rally we’ve had, and whether that can be sustained in a world where inflation is clearly still a factor,” said Brooks Macdonald Chief Investment Officer Edward Park.
New survey data released Tuesday showed U.S. consumer confidence declined slightly in May from the previous months.
Crude prices jumped after European Union leaders said they would impose an oil embargo on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, but later pared their gains. The sanctions are set to include a ban on insuring ships that carry Russian oil, The Wall Street Journal reported. They would include an exemption for oil delivered from Russia via pipelines, which make up one-third of EU oil purchases from Russia.
Front-month futures for Brent crude, the global benchmark, rose 1% to settle at $122.84 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. marker, slipped 0.3% to $114.67 a barrel.
Nine of the S&P 500’s 11 sectors were down on Tuesday. Consumer-discretionary stocks were the best-performing sector, lifted by a 3.8% rise in the shares of online-commerce giant
Amazon.com.
U.S.-traded shares of
Unilever
surged 9.9% after the consumer-goods company said it would add activist investor Nelson Peltz to its board and disclosed his fund now holds a 1.5% stake.
The S&P 500’s energy sector is on track to finish May with the largest gain among the benchmark index’s 11 groups, extending a trend that has flourished for much of 2022. But even some beaten-down stocks are set to end the month in the green, such as
Netflix,
Robinhood Markets
and
Zoom Video Communications.
“When the S&P 500 is [close to entering] a bear market, that has a big psychological impact on those seeking value,” said
Craig Erlam,
senior market analyst at Oanda. “I think the question repeatedly being asked is, ‘Are we seeing a bottom in the markets?’”
In the bond market, the yield on 10-year Treasury notes rose to 2.842% from 2.748% Friday. Bond yields and prices move in opposite directions.
Bitcoin was trading at about $31,664, according to CoinDesk, rising 1.2% from its price at 5 p.m. ET on Monday.
Overseas, the pan-continental Stoxx Europe 600 fell 0.7%, snapping a four-session winning streak, after eurozone inflation rose faster than expected. Consumer prices rose 8.1% on the year in May—the fastest past since records began in 1997—after climbing at a 7.4% rate in April. The inflation report will likely factor into the European Central Bank’s coming interest-rate decisions. Earlier this month, ECB President
Christine Lagarde
indicated that the central bank could increase its key interest rate in July for the first time in 11 years.
Traders worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Friday.
Photo:
Courtney Crow/Zuma Press
In Asia, the Shanghai Composite Index rose 1.2% after the city’s government said a two-month lockdown would be lifted Wednesday. The shutdown, designed to limit Covid-19 transmission, had slowed the Chinese economy and added to inflationary pressures elsewhere in the world by gumming up supply chains.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 1.4%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 0.3%.
Write to Caitlin McCabe at caitlin.mccabe@wsj.com, Joe Wallace at joe.wallace@wsj.com and Alexander Osipovich at alexander.osipovich@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Robinhood Shares Fall Premarket After Bigger-Than-Expected Loss
Robinhood Markets Inc.’s
HOOD -6.45%
stock fell 14% in premarket trading after the brokerage reported a loss of $423 million for the fourth quarter.
The company had an increase in technology and administrative expenses that ate into its results.
The brokerage used by individual investors recorded revenue of $363 million for the October-through-December period, an increase of 14%.
For the year, Robinhood recorded an 89% jump in revenue to $1.82 billion, up from $959 million the previous year. The company’s net loss totaled $3.7 billion for the year.
Robinhood’s results missed analyst expectations. Analysts polled by FactSet expected fourth-quarter revenue of $376 million and a net loss of $225 million.
The brokerage in 2021 experienced momentum in its options and cryptocurrency trading business, as individual investors dabbled in riskier and more speculative trading strategies. But in the fourth quarter, the company said, revenue tied to stock trading fell 35% to $52 million from $80 million.
In contrast, revenue tied to customers’ options trading rose 14% to $163 million.
Robinhood became a darling of the Covid-19 era, as millions of new investors began trying their hand at trading. The brokerage now has 22.7 million customers, it said Thursday, up from 12.5 million in 2020.
The company faces stiff competition. Asset managers such as Fidelity Investments and
BlackRock Inc.
have used their scale to increase profits even while cutting fees. They have also focused on adding products with higher fees.
Robinhood started the first half of 2021 in a strong position as millions of investors entered the market to trade meme stocks such as
GameStop Corp.
and cryptocurrencies such as dogecoin. Yet as the year went on, it was hard to keep the momentum. The company experienced a slowdown in revenue tied to customers’ trading. Revenue tied to cryptocurrency trading was particularly hard hit in the third quarter.
The new year hasn’t provided relief, with trading continuing to fall, the company said.
Robinhood lowered its revenue expectations for the first quarter to less than $340 million, which, at the top end would be a 35% decline.
Jason Warnick,
Robinhood’s chief financial officer, said in a call with the media that trading activity has picked up in recent days.
Mr. Warnick said the company is planning to roll out products that focus on longer-term investing. He said the company expects to begin introducing tax-advantaged retirement accounts midyear and that there is an opportunity to expand internationally—particularly in the cryptocurrency space.
The company started rolling out cryptocurrency wallets this month to some customers, he said. The move allows customers to move their crypto holdings in and out of the Robinhood app.
Shares sank in after-hours trading after finishing Thursday at $11.61, down 6.5% from Wednesday’s close. Robinhood’s stock has been punished lately as investors rotate out of growth companies that were popular last year. Based on Thursday’s close, Robinhood has lost 69% from its initial public offering price of $38 a share.
Write to Caitlin McCabe at caitlin.mccabe@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the January 28, 2022, print edition as ‘Robinhood Posts Loss, Sending Stock Into Nose-Dive.’
SEC Chairman Says Banning Payment for Order Flow Is ‘On the Table’
Gary Gensler, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Melissa Lyttle/Bloomberg
Text size
A controversial practice that has brought in billions of dollars to brokers and high-frequency trading firms is in the crosshairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and could be eliminated entirely.
In an interview with Barron’s on Monday, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said that a full ban of payment for order flow is “on the table.” Payment for order flow is a practice where brokers send trade orders to market makers that execute those trades in return for a portion of the profits.
Gensler says the practice has “an inherent conflict of interest.” Market makers make a small spread on each trade, but that’s not all they get, he said.
“They get the data, they get the first look, they get to match off buyers and sellers out of that order flow,” he said. “That may not be the most efficient markets for the 2020s.”
He didn’t say whether the agency has found instances where the conflicts of interests resulted in harm to investors. SEC staff is reviewing the practice and could come out with proposals in the coming months.
Gensler has mentioned several times that the U.K., Australia, and Canada forbid payment for order flow. Asked if he raises those examples because a ban could also happen in the U.S., he replied: “I’m raising this because it’s on the table. This is very clear.”
It’s not the only thing the SEC is considering.
“Also on the table is how do we move more of this market to transparency,” he said. “Transparency benefits competition, and efficiency of markets. Transparency benefits investors.”
Payment for order is part of a larger issue with market structure that Gensler is trying to solve. He notes that about half of trading is in dark pools or is internalized by companies that keep those trades off exchanges. Even some of the trading that takes place on exchanges is opaque — and exchanges are paid through rebates that are similar to payment for order flow. Opaque markets where different investors have their trade orders processed differently have the potential for abuse.
“It provides an opportunity for the market maker to make more, and for ultimately the investing public to get a little less when they sell, or have to pay more when they buy,” he said. “I think it also affects companies raising money,” he added, because it could be a barrier to “fair, orderly and efficient markets.”
The changes to payment for order flow may take place as part of a larger reshuffling of how trades are processed and tracked.
There has been a boom in retail trading in the past two years, with millions of new investors signing on to brokerage apps to trade stocks, options, and cryptocurrencies for the first time. The boom has been driven in part by a change in the way that brokers make money on customer trading. Most brokers no longer charge for trades up front. They make money off trades by sending orders to market makers like high-frequency trading firms. The market maker executes the trade, and profits off the difference between the bid and asking prices, sending part of that profit back to the broker.
For most brokers, the practice is a relatively small part of their business model — often less than 10% of revenue. But for
Robinhood Markets
(ticker: HOOD), which pioneered zero-commission trading, payment for order flow makes up about 80% of its revenue.
Shares of Robinhood were already trading lower on the day, but fell further after the Barron’s report. In late afternoon trading on Monday, the stock was down 8%, at $43.03.
The company has told investors in securities filings that the SEC’s focus on payment for order flow is a risk factor. But company executives have played down the possibility of it being banned. “Our view internally is that we don’t expect payment for order flow to be banned,” said CFO Jason Warnick on Robinhood’s latest earnings call. He added that “we do think because payment for order flow is such a small revenue stream — it’s about 2 to 2 and a half cents per $100 traded — that it’s not a terribly difficult revenue stream for us to replace.”
But the SEC has found that all those fractions of pennies add up. In fact, the agency settled allegations with Robinhood last year over how it negotiated payment for order flow, and its disclosures to customers. The agency said that Robinhood made deals from 2015 to 2018 with market makers that gave the company a much higher percentage of the spread, whereas other brokers generally gave more of the spread back to customers.
The SEC order said Robinhood had negotiated an 80/20 split, with the company receiving the 80% and investors receiving 20%, whereas other brokers tended to have a split closer to 20/80. And the regulator said that Robinhood’s trade execution was so bad for consumers that it more than outweighed the benefit they got from not having to pay a commission. To settle the allegations, Robinhood agreed to pay $65 million but neither admitted nor denied the findings. The company has also said it has changed its payment for order flow practices.
Proponents of payment for order flow say that it is a way for brokers to make money that doesn’t really hurt consumers, and allow apps to charge zero commissions. It is a major reason that more people than ever have started investing, Robinhood’s Warnick said.
“Never before has investing in this country been cheaper,” he said.
He also noted that other brokers had historically accepted payment for order flow on top of commissions, whereas Robinhood has never charged commissions.
Any change to the practice would clearly be contentious.
“We’ll be definitely defending our customers and making sure that we don’t put up barriers that have been taken down and kept people out,” Warnick said.
Write to Avi Salzman at avi.salzman@barrons.com
Robinhood Revenue Surges on Cryptocurrency Trades
Revenue at Robinhood Markets Inc. more than doubled in the second quarter thanks to a torrent of customers trading cryptocurrency, but the company posted a big loss due to an emergency funding deal earlier this year.
The trading app recorded a loss of $502 million, or $2.16 per share, on revenue of $565 million in its first earnings report since its July initial public offering. In the second quarter of 2020, Robinhood generated a profit of $58 million on revenue of $244 million.
Nearly 14.2 million Robinhood users, or roughly 63% of the company’s customer base with funded accounts, traded digital assets in the second quarter. Robinhood earned $233 million in fees from routing customers’ cryptocurrency trades to high-speed trading firms, with dogecoin accounting for nearly two-thirds of the volume. That is up from just $5 million a year earlier.
That helped offset slowdowns in other parts of Robinhood’s business due in part to waning interest in meme stocks. For instance, fees Robinhood earned executing customers’ stock trades fell 27% to $52 million.
Despite decreased stock-trading activity, interest that Robinhood received on margin loans nearly tripled to $31 million. Around 700,000 users held about $5.4 billion in margin-loan balances at the end of June.