get gym results at home. no expensive machines, no expensive memberships. go to aerotrainer.com to get yours now. emily: i'm emily chang in san francisco, and this is "bloomberg technology." coming up this hour, meme stock mayhem, gamestop hit with six trading halts as volatility spikes. we will track the stomache-churning swing which included other stocks including amc. plus, is it gambling? some institutional investors

believe all the meme market hype is just that and investors on platforms like robinhood trade stocks like a tickets. the robinhood ceo vlad tenev strongly disagrees. much more on that coming up on a special edition of "bloomberg studio 1.0." and pandemic darling roblox enters the market as shares surge 16%, the ceo of a gaming company with big plans for the future, the meta-verse is part of it. we will watch my interview with david. first, u.s. equities advancing as a rotation into value stocks resumes following a week ak inflation report. our ed ludlow has a look at the markets, starting with big name tech earnings. walk us through what you are watching. ed: with everything going on, you forget there are still companies reporting earnings,

starting with oracle, a name we haven't talked about much compared to some of the bigger tech companies, but is that second largest software maker. it reported revenues basically in line with estimates, falling downward 3% after hours. it boosted its quarterly cash dividend by one third to $0.32. larry ellison banking on the idea that as the economy reopens, small and medium-sized businesses will start reinvesting in themselves and shifting things like accounting, hr and software to the cloud. oracle is a latecomer to the cloud. one stock up after hours is bumble, emily, you spoke to the ceo very recently, a recent ipo, this is the dating app where women make the first move, soaring up almost 6% after hours, a positive 2021 revenue forecast saying revenue will be between $716 million and $720 6 million, slightly above street estimates. it is all about a return to normal. they found relevancy during the pandemic because so many of us connected digitally.

but at some point we have to leave our homes and i am sure people will be wanting to go on dates and get out there and that is the hope investors have in this stock as well. oracle shares are down after hours, you saw the incredible run-up in the share price recent weeks, outpacing the s&p 500 and hitting a fresh record. that is why i say this might be a sell the news event. we have to talk about gamestop. oh, we have to talk about gamestop. bring it up on the board because it has been a roller coaster of a day. at one point up almost 40%. over the course of 18 minutes, falling down 30%, and then treading water the rest of the session. what is going on? i don't know, hard to say, but it prompted one td ameritrade strategist to say those willing to invest in gamestop now, he likened it to running into a burning building. that is one take on what is happening with gamestop right now. of course it is really popular on the reddit forum. interestingly, another stock

with the buzz about it on reddit today was roblox. having a pretty decent day, up more than 7%, ending with a market cap of more than $38 billion. that is not bad for a public debut where shares opened at $0.64, this one again has found relevancy during the pandemic, all of us playing a lot on our phones, people playing on mobile phones, it is dominated a lot of charts. made its public debut today on the positive side. emily: absolutely, a lot of us, including my kids, on roblox. i did ask the ceo whether he is concerned about being a meme stock trade. you will hear his answer later in the show. there has been a lot of attention on the broader picture, the stimulus package on the success of the vaccine rollout. give us the bigger picture. ed: broadly, u.s. equities higher. it is the first time we have had two consecutive days in the green for weeks.

you have been splitting between this rotation where value is taking place and tech is less popular. you can see the nasdaq 100 down by one third of 1%, but yesterday up 10%. it is choppy trading while the broader market ticked up. a lot of volatility in chip stocks. monday down 5%, wednesday underperforming and down almost 2%. a lot of choppy changes to tech stocks. a lot of days in the green but more days in the red right now as investors tried to decide, are they still going for tech stocks that were popular in the pandemic, or the reopening? emily: ed, thank you for bringing it, appreciate it. sticking with market moves, i want to bring in michael purves,

ceo and founder of tailbacken capital. what is your metaphor for the meme gamestop trade, is it like running into a burning building or something else? michael: i'm more of an observer in all that. my 19-year-old daughter was asking me yesterday whether she should sell the remainders of gme and i said yes. honestly i think you are dealing with -- it is very hard to really come up with a valuation for gamestop at the number it has been trading at today and yesterday and so forth that, to me, resonates. your guest was just discussing, what -- is this gambling or is this investing?

i think there is a lot of confusion about what is really happening. there are a lot of people are making money in it, but there are also very valid investment cases in gamestop. someone told me there was a case running around wsb for a $30,000 share price there, so i think new investors have to really step back and just realize that this kind of frenzied activity, what happens is narratives start taking over and the laws of finance will eventually reassert themselves. so recognize what you are working with. if you want to be trading volatile stocks, fine, but make sure you have the stop losses in place. emily: all questions we are going to ask robinhood ceo vlad tenev on "bloomberg studio 1.0" at the bottom of the hour. what is your broader long-term view on tech and its weighting

in your portfolio? are we at the beginning of a longer-term correction here, or is this a blip and things will keep going? michael: right now we are seeing a lot of sensitivity of tech stocks to interest rates, interest rates climbing the past few weeks. and the factor with 10-year interest rates skyrocketing, my view is that the interest rate narrative is overblown. and i think it is also misinterpreted. it is not really about your discounted cash flows being worth less because the industry rate has gone up. it is more to do with looking at the nominal yield spread to the 10 year treasury yield is a lot tighter than it is in other indices. at the same time in value indices or cyclicals, those baskets are looking at very, very large earnings accelerations, so it is going to provide even more buffer for the relative value to treasuries argument.

with all that being said, i think over the next several months, probably the rest of the year, i think you're going to start seeing a lot more bifurcation where the big, established tech companies, the microsofts, amazons, googles, really reassert themselves. and some of the real story stocks decouple. and some of them will probably be amazing, and a whole bunch of of them will be less than amazing. it is important to bifurcate, establish cash flow, establish positioned companies that are dying the high-end of the ndx, versus some of the really interesting and potentially very valuable companies down the road. but the valuations associated with them are very, very stretched. so i would expect some polarization within tech that way. emily: now, roblox had a good

day but if you look at recent spac's and ipo's, they have been slumping compared to bumble, airbnb, both those companies doubling on their opening days. i know you were listening when i spoke to cathie wood the other day, and she encapsulates what is controversial about this market. curious what your thoughts are on her strategy. obviously making big bets and staying committed to memes despite pullback across the board. michael: right. i think one thing that has been talked about a lot is that when you are in the structure she is in, she is not any venture-capital firm, not at a private equity firm, she is in a liquid vehicle, so liquidity risk is really important, particularly for the smaller, less-liquid names. and so, if investors are expecting the convenience in

liquidity of an etf, but the names in there are scaling fast in terms of inflows and capital being invested in those companies, at some point you have a recipe for nasty downside performance, not just for that etf, but for those names itself. so that is one thing. and i think it would be nice to see how she is thinking through liquidity management as she scales her etf. on the other hand, i thought she made a good point in your interview about the fact that growth versus value, well, so many value stocks, whether they are banks or energy companies or so forth, are facing massive

structural change thanks to technology. right? and i have seen this over and over again with my clients that are value investors, where they underestimate that. and so i think she made a really, really good point there. but i think one other facet -- sorry? emily: mike, i want to hear more. we will have to have you back. we have to go, but thank you so much for stopping by and giving us your unvarnished view of what is happening. michael purves, ceo and founder of tailbacken capital advisors. coming up, in its public debut, game maker roblox makes real money off its virtual world. we hear from the ceo about why he thought the direct listing for his company was the right way to go. that is next. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: shares of the online gaming company roblox, soaring in their public debut, closing more than 8% above opening trade at $64.50 on the new york stock exchange. i spoke with ceo david baszucki, along with my colleague guy johnson. >> we have a value around our community, respecting the community. what we are so excited about today is that everyone is coming together. our long-term employees, our amazing investors who have been with us for a long time and had really supported us, our new investors, who we are really excited to bring into our community, and possibly smaller investors who are familiar with roblox. we love the direct listing for roblox because we are all going

to come together and the first trade will be at the same price for everyone. emily: speaking of smaller investors, are you concerned about becoming a meme stock target? analysts out there say retail traders could take you on like gamestop, for better or for worse. david: one of our values is, take the long view. and with the company over the last seven months as we started talking about coming here to be public is really looking to the future. we are looking two years out. we are focused on building the platform, the technology, building an amazingly civil society, finding the amazing people to power roblox, and we are not watching what is going on with meme stocks. emily: my kids and i spent some time on roblox preparing for this interview with you today. they are still a little young, but they would stay on there for hours if i would let them. what are your plans for post

pandemic growth? i know you expect growth to slow this year. how do you continue to grow if we are not on lockdown and how do you reach older adult? david: absolutely. we have been growing for 15 years and everyone at roblox wants covid to end as soon as possible. we reach out to everyone around us. but looking to the future, what has powered our growth is the amazing content on the platform, and also people coming together on the platform. today, a lot of the time to play, but in the future, more and more it will be to learn together or to work together. inside roblox, we are holding our company town halls on roblox, and our holiday party and later today, we are going into a roblox virtual new york stock exchange, and get to celebrate this. there are amazing growth opportunities in bringing everyone together around the world, connecting all ages, and as we expand, thinking about a

new vision of what of technology this will support. emily: let's talk about content. the first game my kids found was a shooter, very popular in my school community. parents want to know about content moderation, about settings, and whether you will provide us the tools to better gauge keep the -- better gate keep the app for our children. david: safety and stability is our top priority. it is what forms the foundation of everything we do on roblox. there are thousands of moderators who are watching all the content. we screen all of the content on the platform. we have computer filtering as well. it is really the basis for building a civil society on the platform, that we believe can help bring people together. emily: now, i want to ask about your vision for the meta-verse, which is this far out idea that we are all going to be living and working and playing in a virtual world. elon musk thinks we are already living in a computer simulation.

what is your vision, and how soon does it take to get to this meta-verse that you have imagined? david: we have an optimistic vision around the meta-verse, just as books or as video has brought us together and helped us learn. we are optimistic that some day in schools, when people study ancient rome, they will travel together to experience ancient rome. we are also optimistic that as this meta-verse comes into reality, people will understand physical versus digital and they will balance that, just as they do with books today. guy: how will it look from a parent's point of view? emily brought up the issue of keeping it clean, and my kids play this and are on it quite regularly, but i am curious, how much is it going to cost you to keep his platform clean as a percentage of sales? and do you see that number rising as it becomes bigger? david: yeah, one of the exciting things about the roblox platform

is the more we build systems of the more we augment people with computer algorithms and computer filtering, most of our systems have scaled very, very well with our users. our infrastructure is scaling well, so we don't see an issue of scaling that moderation function, which forms the foundation really of the platform. guy: so david, do you think you are going to be opening up more platforms? because certainly there are, in my experience, huge numbers of kids that have nintendo and play all kinds of other games on it, but the one they can't seem to play on it is roblox right now. david: it is a great point and highlights our vision for the roblox platform, in that this immersive, social 3d that brings people together, whether it's a phone, tablet, computer, gaming console, vr, these are all ways for people to access that

content. we are on phones, tablets, and computers right now. we are on the xbox but not the switch. those are all awesome attentional future places for roblox. emily: you have a lot of cash right now. any plan to use that cash requisitions to advance these big plans? david: nothing announced, but we made two incredible acquisitions the last two months. that would be a natural place for us to look as we grow this amazing platform. emily: my interview there with roblox ceo david baszucki. we will keep our eye on them. coming up, a big pushback from facebook as it makes its first formal response to a massive ftc lawsuit. all the details on this high-stakes battle, next. this is bloomberg. ♪ oomberg. ♪

>> big tech is now more powerful than ever. yes, they are more powerful economically.

we rely on them more economically. they are more powerful socially. we rely on them more for our connections. and they are more powerful politically. we need to break up big tech. emily: senator elizabeth warren there with bloomberg's kevin cirilli talking about her concerns about the power of big tech, calling for a breakup. facebook has filed a formal notion to a federal judge to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit by the ftc, saying the government is attempting a do over, trying to unwind acquisitions that got approval years ago. joining us for more is david. what is facebook's argument here and could they actually get this suit thrown out? david: well, certainly that is what they are trying to do, to knock it out of court at a very early stage for the case was filed in december. this is their first formal response to the government's lawsuit.

they make a lot of arguments, but one key thing they say is that, as you said, the government is trying to do a do over. they reviewed both of these deals, the instagram at whatsapp deals, investigated them years ago, and now, they are trying to come back and unwind them. emily: facebook lists a bunch of services that they compete with . tiktok, twitter, snap, linkedin, saying that the government is ignoring the realities of the competition that they face. what happens next now that facebook has made this move? david: right, so, the ftc and the states who sued will respond to this and ultimately it will go to a judge. there could be an argument before the judge, and it is certainly possible that it gets dismissed. i think that is probably unlikely, but we will see. on the competitors, the other

key issue here is, what is this market, who are facebook's real competitors, is there really a social media market that is just facebook or are there other players that will be an issue in the case? emily: does facebook have other suits to worry about? david: well, the main one right now is this ftc case, and the state cases. they are both sort of running in parallel. i think the fact that there are two cases gives the government, the state, and the federal government, two attempts at undoing these deals. emily: all right. david mclaughlin, we will continue to follow. thank you for your reporting on this. coming up, vlad tenev wants investing to be as ubiquitous as shopping on amazon. he is one of the most controversial and compelling ceo's in tech yet.

my wide-ranging interview with him up next on a special edition of "bloomberg studio 1.0." this is bloomberg. ♪ oomberg. ♪

♪ emily: robinhood launched in april 2013 with a stated mission to democratize investing. named for the legendary outlaw who stole from the rich to give to the poor. thanks to a slick interface, the no commissions or minimums, the idea is anyone, anywhere can invest in thousands of stocks just like the big guys, as this super bowl ad suggests. >> you don't need to become an investor. you were born one. emily: but taking on wall street has led to the >> after test. > robinhood and interactive

brokers are all experiencing outages. reporter: from outages to a $65 million fine from the sec, and then the perfect storm january 27. >> this is unbelievable, anywhere from 40% to 800% gains. emily: traders drove up the price of gamestop another so-called meme stocks so high , so fast, that robin hood faced a demand for billions of dollars to offset risk. the company restricted buying of stocks including gamestop, and 13 were furious. customers the stocks plunged and the ceo had to answer to lawmakers. >> at that moment, we would not have been able to post the $3 billion in collateral. emily: robin hood now faces even more questions about its model and whether it is exposing its novice model and investors to undue risk. here to answer the question on this special edition of "bloomberg studio 1.0," robinhood ceo vlad tenev.

you and your co-founder started robinhood in part in response to the occupy wall street movement, which was filled with angst against the financial system and then amplified on social media. do you see the gamestop frenzy as an echo of that? vlad: i think you are seeing a continuation of a few things. if you look at a lot of the angst after the last financial crisis, people were very , very frustrated that the recovery went to the wealthy. it went to institutions. we built robin hood to enable economic opportunity for everyone. we wanted everyone to have access to the capital markets, which has been one of the greatest wealth creation engines in human history. so i think what you are seeing now is a movement by individuals

to participate and become a bigger and bigger force in the financial markets. emily: both of you are immigrants. you grew up in bulgaria, your parents worked at the world bank. how has that shaped your perspective? vlad: yeah, so i immigrated from bulgaria when i was five years old. obviously, when my family and i came to the u.s. in the early '90s, we were starting from nothing. my dad was a graduate student, my mom worked as a waitress and also in one of the few remaining textile plants in the u.s. at the time. had the experience of starting from basically nothing. also, in bulgaria in the mid-'90s, the financial system effectively collapsed. there was a period in 1997 where the bulgarian currency was going through hyperinflation, and you

are seeing around 2000% annualized inflation. i think we have -- we sort of assumed in the u.s. that we have the u.s. dollar and it is stable and it is a baseline that we can rely on. i think seeing my grandparents go through that experience in bulgaria where their pensions became essentially worthless really led me to appreciate that you have to be diversified and be plugged into a global financial system where you can diversify your wealth and spread your savings around and not rely too much on any one tool or asset. i got to experience that very directly. emily: now, you became sole ceo in november 2020, and in the first three months in that role,

you navigated one of the biggest crises in the company's history you testified before congress. , what have you learned in those three months? vlad: there is the phrase that there is some decades when nothing happens and some weeks when decades happen, which i think is representative of what we have been through at robinhood. i think that not just robinhood, the entire industry has seen investing go from something that is very niche, something that you hear about on tv, but a relatively small number of people were actually interested in. and now you are seeing investing very much be a part of the cultural zeitgeist. people are talking about it on social media. we are having congressional hearings about it. and i think anything entering the cultural zeitgeist, anything new like that, there is bound to be some confusion, there is

bound to be some stress. i just have to keep it in perspective for myself that this is kind of what i signed up for, and anytime you are causing change in society and upending the status quo, it is probably not going to be the most comfortable process. emily: i'm curious how testifying before congress ranks on the nerves scale, the hard things that ceo's have to do. vlad: yeah, i hadn't done anything like that before. the way that i thought about it was this is just a great opportunity to tell the story of robinhood, and not just the events of january 28, but the broader story of retail investor participation in our financial system.

one of the unsung, untold stories, is if you look at the 2020 recovery, people that are getting into the stock market are more diverse. there is a lot more women entering the space than ever before. generally, we've been a positive force, and people on robinhood have done quite well. i announced at the congressional hearing actually that if you look at our aggregate customer activity, the unrealized and realized gains, including crypto and stocks, were over $35 billion. that is as of february, $35 billion of value that is in customers' pockets, literally their smartphones, and without robinhood, that may not have been possible, especially during such difficult times as the pandemic. emily: you said you got that call from your clearinghouse at 3:30 in the morning, january 28,

asking you to put up an extra $3 billion. take me back to that moment and describe how it felt, knowing you were going to have to make a hard call. vlad: we played it by the books, and i'm proud of how they handle that. -- handled it. we look back and we say what are the things we could have done better, and i'm sure there's many, many things that we could have done better, specifically with how we communicated with the decision and the days leading up to it, we were seeing increased volatility. as far as the operations team and how they were acting in a moment of very high stress, i'm very proud of that team and their professionalism and the way they had to juggle making customers that wanted to buy meme stocks happy but also

protecting the financial system and our much broader, larger customer base. emily: you decided to allow selling, but not buying of 13 securities including gamestop, and you and i spoke on that day. i've never seen so much anger in response to an interview on social media. customers were livid. they thought you were lying, they thought you were in cahoots with hedge funds, they thought you were just trying to protect yourself for the company. -- or the company. did you understand that anger, or where that was coming from? vlad: i think a lot of it was based on the false premise of robinhood colluding with hedge funds, or melvin capital. there was even a rumor that the white house had called us and told us to shut down trading of the stocks. i think there is a lot of misinformation. what i wanted to do was dispel the misinformation.

so when i came on your show that day -- and by the way, obviously i was kind of running on fumes trying to navigate through the day-to-day of the issue, the $7 several billion dollars and obviously it was a tricky situation -- but i will say that as angry as people were, we prevented them from buying, had we prevented customers from selling and capturing the gains on the stock, people would have been much more angry. there would have been riots on the streets had we stopped selling. this idea that things would've been better, i think it is just categorically false. emily: what do you say to critics who say you are democratizing addiction, you are glorifying gambling? vlad: i reject the idea that investing in the u.s. capital markets is gambling.

♪

emily: free trading is the industry standard now. robinhood has been under scrutiny for gamifying that trading, and the controversy has reopened a broader question of your role in society. what do you say to critics who say you are democratizing addiction, you are glorifying gambling? vlad: i reject the idea that investing in the u.s. capital markets is gambling. i think we have a problem in this country, which is that the -- since the end of world war ii, more and more of the corporate stocks in america have been owned by advisors or other institutions or intermediaries.

the end of world war ii, the majority of stocks were held by households. and that's been going down over time. i think at the same time you've scene really high concerns about income inequality and wealth inequality, and these concerns threaten the fabric of our society. i think people agree that is a problem. we have real potential to curb that. any attempt to prevent individuals from accessing the markets directly is poorly directed. if anything, we should be looking at how to encourage individuals to invest in the

markets directly and make it even easier to remove the remaining barriers in the way. emily: that said, gary gensler, president biden's pick to run the sec, said he will address the gamification of investing is one of his top priorities. what would that mean for robinhood? vlad: well, i think first of all we are excited to work with the incoming administration to clarify some of the things. we welcome people looking into it. i think what they will find is gamification is poorly defined. it is not happening on robinhood. i think people just want to invest in stocks, and regardless of whether they do it on robinhood for any of the other brokers with zero commissions and low count and imams that is now possible. emily: on the point of gamification, your confetti

animation, the confetti that pops when users make certain trades, it is something that you have defended, but bloomberg has reported it is something you are thinking about potentially getting rid of. what is the status of that? vlad: i should say i'm a bit surprised by how much attention the confetti animation has gotten. it is literally an animation that comes up after you have made your first trade. you think from reading some of the commentary that confetti is flying through the app all over the place. the way we thought about it is the first time someone becomes an investor, and we do have a lot of first-time investors in our product, that first moment of buying a stock and becoming an owner in a company is a milestone moment that people should celebrate. so you will see confetti animation on your first trade,

you will see us adding snowflakes if the markets are closed on december 25 or january 1, snowflakes will fall on the app. there is a lot of these delightful graphical moments where it is just reflective of almost an artist sending their work. emily: does that mean you are not getting rid of it anytime soon? vlad: well, i don't want to talk about specific decisions. we don't want to make decisions governed by what the media says about robinhood. but we are always looking to improve the experience. sometimes we might replace things with things that we feel make customers happier and meet their needs. we are always looking to do that, and it might mean certain

changes to the customer interface, and it might mean other things. i guess just be on the lookout for them. emily: now, we are seeing a prolonged selloff in the markets. i've seen a bunch of people tweeting screenshots of their robinhood notifications. it was a bloodbath for a lot of people, including many of your customers who are only used to things going up. if there is a correction, how worried are you about your customers hurting? and if your customers are hurting on a large-scale, does that hurt robinhood? vlad: we definitely want to make sure we align ourselves with long-term customer outcomes. we have been saying the entire time that investing is a skill. we encourage people to get started early but also build up these habits over a long period of time. i'm personally a huge believer

in long-term investing. a plot of the shorter-term trading --and a lot of the shorter-term trading makes its way to the public discourse because it is more interesting and there's more to talk about then someone just tilting up a diversified portfolio over time but that is how most of our customers use our products. most of our customers aren't buying and selling on a daily basis. they are building up portfolios and largely doing old activities. that said, in 2020 we got a little bit of a taste of how people react to a market crash and a correction. we found that our customers, because they are younger, looked at it as a buying opportunity and as an opportunity to buy into the market at historically low multiples. we sought more deposits and more purchasing of stock than ever

before. emily: you know, i know you have big plans, a big vision. what are your priorities? vlad: my now half of u.s. -- right now about half of u.s. households invest. we would like to get that number up to 95% plus. ♪

emily: robinhood has gotten a lot of criticism for not having enough customer support, and of course, i'm reminded of the story of 20-year-old alex kearns, who committed suicide in june of 2020 after seeing a negative balance of $730,000 on his robinhood account that turned out to be a mistake. he emailed customer support, he got an automated response, and by the time robinhood replied with the actual situation, which was not as dire as he thought, it was too late. how much responsibility do you think robinhood bears in that situation? vlad: i think we bear responsibility for learning from it and making sure that we

respond and improve our product and our customer service model to prevent cases like that from being repeated. and certainly that is what we did. we announce very shortly after mr. kearns's passing that we are taking a series of extremely aggressive measures, including product changes, changes to how we communicate buying power, particularly negative buying power, and adding wide phone -- live phone support, which we started out offering for high severity options trading cases, but has since expanded to other cases like account security, stock trading. the response has been really awesome. we are looking to expand it to all cases at robinhood. emily: let's get your ipo. bloomberg has reported you are considering selling some shares directly to your customers.

can you give us the status of that? vlad: clearly this is a business that requires capital, and we have shown that we have a variety of means to capitalize the business, and we see a huge growth opportunity ahead of us. i think it is a seminal moment. for the individual investor. it is an opportunity for us to serve them and continue to elevate the individual investor in the eyes of the american public. that is my focus, squarely on customers and delivering for them. and i think that all the other things are just in support of that core mission. emily: you are facing dozens of lawsuits. what is your intention on how to fight these, and do you have any concern that could impact your ipo trajectory? vlad: we will defend the firm vigorously, because we disagree with the fundamental premise.

i think the facts will come out, and it will bear out that robinhood is a customer-focused company that is operating with the highest standards of integrity and will continue to do so. emily: if payment for order flow gets taken away, do you have another option? vlad: i think a lot of the payment for order flow concern is more or less baseless. people don't understand the details behind it, and so they are throwing out a lot of these accusations. it is complicated, i understand that. it is hard to grasp how payment for order flow works. we are doing our best to try to demystify it. we are putting out a lot of content on our blog and on

social media that actually shows -- demonstrates that we believe it is better for customers. people get price improvement, which they wouldn't be able to get if we routed their marketable orders through exchanges. they get a higher degree of certainty of execution. in our model -- and our models basically align incentives and makes it so that all of our market makers paid the same rate, thereby removing conflict of interest from the relationship. i not only think it is a good model, i think it's an innovative model and an example and probably a big part of why the american financial markets

have their world leading position. we have allowed innovative models to flourish and not try to regulate them out of existence. emily: i know you have big plans, a big vision. beyond the basic brokerage and the features you have now, what are the basic milestones ahead? what are your priorities? vlad: i think you can look at our vision broadly and say that right now about half of u.s. households invest. we would like to get that number up to 95% plus. investing should be as ubiquitous as shopping online, just something that people do. moreover, i think there is an opportunity to expand that beyond the u.s. there is no reason why the greatest financial system the world has ever seen should be only available to americans. we can make that available globally, and not just to high-net-worth individuals, the wealthiest 1% globally, but were mass-market.

i think that is a huge opportunity. emily: all right, vlad, thank you so much for joining us. vlad tenev, robinhood ceo, appreciate you taking the time today. ♪

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