Alphacution has written recently about the emerging evidence of "crypto PFOF." Based on Robinhood's latest earnings and other regulatory data, Alphacution takes that recent analysis a step further to illustrate the emerging significance of wholesale market making in cryptocurrencies and the players behind it...
Like the Lock Ness monster and Big Foot, Alphacution has found evidence of crypto PFOF...
Robinhood IPO puts the secretive practice of ‘payment for order flow’ in the spotlight. Here’s how it works... By Fortune finance reporter, Jessica Mathews
In this 193-page, 272-exhibit, 30,800-word case study, “The Robinhood Effect,” Alphacution brings together data and modeling from 25 entities – 11 retail brokers and 14 wholesale market makers – to explain a new phenomenon that now lives at the center of the US capital markets ecosystem. Alphacution’s most ambitious research project to date, this report covers the governing liquidity economics framework that defines PFOF rates, the mechanics of Robinhood’s aggressive retail brokerage model, the transformation of the retail brokerage industry, the sophisticated strategy architectures of wholesale market makers, and the “retail flow factors” that impact all market actors in the ecosystem – among many other themes and avenues for future research. An executive summary is available for review and download by open subscribers (w/ free registration). The complete case study is available to premium subscribers or via individual report purchase.
Fintech reporter, Tomio Geron, from Protocol - a new media company from the publisher of POLITICO focusing on the people, power and politics of tech - publishes article based largely on Alphacution's research.
On a lazy Thursday afternoon leading up to the US 4th of July holiday weekend, Robinhood unveils its IPO (S-1) document to the world. Here are some early highlights and analysis that can only be found at Alphacution...
In this introduction to the 17-page, 21-exhibit presentation – Part III of Alphacution’s case study on payment for order flow (PFOF) – we present our preliminary development of the “retail flow factor” for 2020 based largely on a reconciliation of 606 data (from 10 retail brokers / 11 entities) and 605 data (from 7 wholesale market makers). The results include estimated monthly penetration of retail order flow relative to the full U.S. cash equities market for 2020 – including estimated breakdowns of odd lots and round lots – as well as some hints on where we will need to look next to further refine this factor in preparation for extending this analysis throughout 2021 and beyond…
Alphacution expands upon an outstanding analysis by BestEx Research on PFOF with additional context on price improvement by leading wholesale market makers.
In Part I of Alphacution’s case study on payment for order flow (PFOF), we focused mainly on the rates paid by wholesale market makers to retail brokers under a full range of securities categories and order type scenarios. In this 22-page, 20-exhibit deck, Alphacution presents PART II of its upcoming comprehensive case study, The Robinhood Effect, with a focus on a concept called broker personas. Alphacution’s working hypothesis on this topic is that each retail broker – in fact, all order flow intermediaries – have a unique persona. This persona – a unique pattern formed by order type distributions – is a distillation of client trading behaviors. In this presentation, Alphacution demonstrates that broker personas are partly due to investor demographics and, more interestingly, partly due to broker influence. Furthermore, when we broaden our perspective to consider that retail brokers are now compensated for trade flows largely by their wholesaler counterparts, we see a clearer picture of how desired outcomes could be manufactured…
Stephen Gandel, a contributor to CBS News and Moneywatch, published "Robinhood raked in at least $110 million from 'meme stock' rally" on May 7, 2021, in part based on Alphacution's analysis of Robinhood's Q1 2021 order routing revenue.
