By: fox Business
July 28, 2021
As Wall Street gears up for Robinhood’s highly-anticipated foray onto the open market, the company has quietly been laying the groundwork to become a standalone market maker, FOX Business has learned.
During its “roadshow” for its much-anticipated IPO, executives for the trading app said it’s looking to reduce its reliance on revenues from selling buy and sell orders to various market makers, a practice known as “payment for order flow,” or PFOF, on Wall Street.
One way to reduce its reliance on PFOF is for Robinhood to actually match its own order flow instead of selling it to other brokers, company executives said. They even hinted during the roadshow meetings with investors that they too will be looking at getting into the business, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Robinhood is pricing its IPO tonight and shares are scheduled to trade Thursday on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol HOOD. It plans to sell 55 million shares, and raise as much as $2.3 billion.