How Robinhood became an obsession – Wall Street power moves – Gorman’s big raise

How Robinhood became an obsession – Wall Street power moves – Gorman’s big raise

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Happy Saturday, and welcome to Insider Finance. Here's a rundown of the must-know stories from the past week:

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Generation Robinhood: How the trading app conditioned inexperienced users to obsessively play the market

The app aims to make trading easy and fun for a simple reason: The more users trade, the more money Robinhood makes. The startup's business model, in fact, is based in large part on what is known as payment for order flow (PFOF) “” taking the buy and sell orders that users place and selling them directly to large trading firms. 

More stories on the retail-trading frenzy:

How a decade of repairing Morgan Stanley after the financial crisis made James Gorman the highest-paid CEO on Wall Street

Morgan Stanley was nearly toppled by subprime mortgage exposure during the financial crisis.  In 2020, Morgan Stanley inked big deals for E-Trade and Eaton Vance and raked in record revenue. CEO James Gorman is now the highest paid bank exec on Wall Street, and the firm recently named a bumper class of new MDs.

Here's how the bank remade itself over the past 10 years, and why CFO