It’s hard to find two people who better represent the retail boom than Vlad Tenev, co-director of popular online broker Robinhood, and Dave Portnoy, the naughty founder of Barstool Sports who began investing when the COVID-19 pandemic closed. . the world of sports.
Portnoy met with Tenev on Tuesday night, via GameStop GME,
saga that has already been chewed by the House Financial Services Committee.
The interview began with the man named Davey Day Trader asking a Tenev dressed in a Taco hat if he knew everyone hated his guts, as Robinhood’s decision to restrict trading on GameStop ended with the short impulse of this trade. Tenev was asked about the discrepancy between his entry into CNBC and the denial that there was a liquidity problem, and then revealed in an interview days later that the broker was facing a $ 3 billion margin call at the three in the morning.
Tenev said it was not, as Portnoy described, a 180-degree change. “Reducing it to a liquidity issue outweighs it and resells it simultaneously,” he said. Tenev said Robinhood was not the only company to limit trade to video game retailer GameStop, AMC Entertainment.
and other popular actions, calling it a “systemic problem.”
Tenev bluntly asked if Robinhood would have regulated GameStop trading and other popular Reddit actions without the 3 a.m. phone call, Tenev admitted no. “If we had a wider margin, we would probably have let things go on,” he said. And Tenev admitted that the company would have faced a liquidity problem (the next day) if it had not acted. Defending his interview on CNBC, Tenev said it “worked with smoke,” as he struggled to raise $ 3.4 billion in capital to trade without restrictions.
Portnoy also insisted on Tenev whether Robinhood should have restricted the sale and also the purchase (so as not to crater the shares), to which Tenev replied that the margin requirements would not have been helped by the sale limitation.
Here is the full interview.
CNBC star Jim Cramer shared his opinion on the interview.