It’s hard to find two people who epitomize the retail trade boom better than Vlad Tenev, the co-CEO of popular online broker Robinhood, and Dave Portnoy, the bold founder of Barstool Sports who started investing when the COVID- pandemic 19 ended the world of sports.
Portnoy interviewed Tenev on Tuesday night at GameStop GME,
saga that has already been chewed by the Chamber’s Financial Services Committee.
The interview began with the man calling himself Davey Day Trader asking a Tenev dressed as Taco Tuesday if he knew everyone hated his courage, as Robinhood’s decision to restrict GameStop trading effectively ended the short moment. in this negotiation. Tenev was asked about the discrepancy between his entry on CNBC and denying that there was a liquidity problem, revealing in an interview days after the brokerage faced a $ 3 billion margin call at 3 am.
Tenev said it was not, as Portnoy described it, a 180-degree shift. “Reducing it to a liquidity issue while selling too much and too little simultaneously,” he said. Tenev said Robinhood was not the only company that limited trade in video game retailer GameStop, AMC Entertainment AMC, a chain of theaters,
and other popular actions, calling it a “systemic problem”.
Asked outright whether Robinhood would have regulated GameStop trading and other popular Reddit actions without the 3 am call, Tenev admitted that he had not. “If we had a lot more space, we probably would 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 with CNBC, Tenev said he was “out of breath” as he struggled to raise $ 3.4 billion in capital to restrict trade.
Portnoy also pressured Tenev about whether Robinhood should have restricted sales as well as purchases – not to damage inventories – to which Tenev replied that margin requirements would not have been helped by limiting sales.
You can watch the full interview here.
CNBC star Jim Cramer shared his opinion in the interview.