Robinhood’s founders got the idea while selling trading software to Wall Street hedge funds.
In 2010 Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, roommates at Stanford, were selling trading software in New York. They saw that big Wall Street firms paid next to nothing to trade stocks, while most Americans paid a commission on every trade. Their app charged none, and by 2021 most of the old brokerages had dropped commissions too.
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