Startups Weekly: What the E-Trade deal says about Robinhood – TechCrunch

How well do Robinhood's financials stack up against incumbent online brokerages? While we wait for the seven-year-old company's long-planned IPO, Alex Wilhelm examined Morgan Stanley's big $13 billion purchase of E-Trade for fresh data comparison points. Robinhood has 10 million accounts -- twice what E-Trade has -- but it also appears to make much less money per user and has far fewer assets under management, as he covered for Extra Crunch. So while its fee-free approach has destroyed a key revenue stream for competitors, it still has to grow its own "order-flow" business into its private-market valuation. One solution is to make the platform stickier via social features.