Robinhood is outrunning its online brokerage rivals, at least by one widely followed industry metric for customer activity.
The company, which runs a no-fee trading app in the U.S. that’s drawing millions of new users as well as a few critics, said that daily average revenue trades — known as DARTs — were 4.31 million in June. That’s about four times the number of fee-generating trades at E-Trade for the same period, and higher than all of its publicly traded rivals. Robinhood is among brokers that still use the DART term even though they don’t charge fees.
The firm is revealing the data for the first time, in the wake of a surge in online dealing among people stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic. Newbie investors this year have flocked in record numbers to zero-fee trading apps such as Robinhood and British platform AJ Bell, but the rush has prompted
And just as Robinhood is disclosing DARTs, it’s blocking access to other trading data. Robintrack.net, the website with hourly updates on retail stock demand that became a minor obsession of Wall Street, will
Robintrack used data from the app showing broad trends among Robinhood users’ trading to display which stocks were popular with its clients. The information became a proxy for the preferences of individual investors everywhere. Robinhood will stop providing the feed on which the site’s information is based out of concern that it misrepresents client activity.
The online brokerage has repeatedly argued that most of its users “buy and hold” stocks, rather than engaging in frenzied trading. “As customers spend more time on the platform, most of them buy more stocks than they sell,” a spokeswoman said in an email. “The vast majority of Robinhood customers are not day traders.”
The data shows that daily trades at Robinhood more than doubled in the second quarter from the prior period. The top three days in terms of trading volumes occurred in June. The company hasn’t committed to releasing the DART figures every month.
Robinhood said in May that 3 million new funded accounts were added in 2020, with
Growth at a breakneck speed has been accompanied by some hiccups. A
With assistance from Annie Massa and Sarah Ponczek.