It may be 'excellent' relative to competitors in "shitty old financial company app" space, but it is in no way excellent compared to a high quality phone app.
Robinhood is successful because their software is actually good. My bullish case for them would be them leveraging this capability as a way in to becoming a Fidelity sized financial competitor.
Their CEO's inability to honestly communicate with the public is hurting them though. He should have lead with their liquidity clearing house issues and directly addressed the apparent conflict of interest. He appears to either be unwilling or incapable of doing this.
They've now after the fact explained some of the clearing house issues, but they still act as if they don't understand the conflict of interest question. Just address it directly.
When Elon asked him about it he should have said something like, "I can see why people would think we'd be under pressure from the funds that buy our order flow, but we live and die by our retail reputation and would not risk that to illegally coordinate with these funds. We'd go direct to our retail customers first. That said, we were not asked to do what we did or pressured by them, we had to make choices on the fly to stay liquid and in that craziness I failed to communicate what we were doing in real time to our users - that was my failure".
Instead he mostly dodged the substantive question and came across as full of shit (only addressing the narrow aspects not really in dispute). I think this could be the truth, but when paired with him lying on TV about their liquidity issues it leads me to distrust him, and by extension the company.
I suspect the reality is something in the middle, considering what RH's customers (the funds) would want, fear of mentioning their liquidity issue causing a run, and the clearing house concern. He handled this poorly.
Well that's a long reply, and I agree with you by and large. RH has a bright future if they communicate better with their users.
Re: Fidelity, by excellent I mean: it does what I want it to do, and the UI is clear enough. To be fair, I'm an infrequent trader who mainly uses Fidelity for banking, so I don't spend much time on the app. I'm also willing to sacrifice UI flashiness for a functional service that doesn't block me from trading when I do.
[ETA: I believe there's a lot to be said, and has been said, for ugly functional UIs that outlast fancier competition. The archetype is craigslist]
It sounds like we probably agree on most things and use fidelity in roughly the same way.
I’d argue Craigslist’s design is ugly, but quite good - it’s dense/high bandwidth, does exactly what people want without fluff. It’s fast. They also benefit a lot from network effects, but even ignoring that I think the website does a pretty good job doing what it's supposed to and is easy to use.
Fidelity is ugly and bad. Hundreds of hidden menus. Many things can’t be done via the app. Some actions require a phone call. Options trading sucks.
For an example, I wanted to wire my rent. The place to do this is via transfers.
Specifically: Transfer -> to bank account -> that I do not own.
That’s the flow to wire money to an external person. It’s not obvious and buried and it can only be done on a desktop.
Automated deposits are similarly cumbersome.
The app is also quite slow and the login flow is painful.
My first thought logging into their mobile app and desktop was "Jesus Christ this is terrible". Maybe it is functional, but RH knocks UI out of the park.
