Robinhood receives payments from some marker makers, with whom it signed contracts, for routing order flows to them. This is a pretty standard practice adopted by all brokers, and it constitutes a major portion of Robinhood's income. In fact, all brokers have incentives to route your orders to whichever marker makers that will pay them the most, in order to maximize their profits, probably at the expense of not giving you the best "price improvement." Well, I guess Robinhood didn't promise any price improvements like other brokers to whom you pay commissions. (Of course, they have to comply with the NBBO rule, that is, your order must not be filled at a price worse than the NBBO bid-ask spread. If you find any NBBO violations, you could certainly file a complaint to SEC against your broker.) Other possible sources of revenues in Robinhood's business model could include: liquidity rebates from exchanges (for non-marketable orders), interests on your deposited cash, lending margin or paid margin programs (like their Robinhood Gold membership), etc. But the payments from marker makers mentioned above should constitute the majority and the most consistent source of revenue flow for them.
Yes, I guess they do not route market orders to the exchanges, or they may be charged for taking the liquidity off the exchanges. Since they do not charge commissions on their clients, they do not have incentives to create internal dark pools, like IB and a few other infamous brokers, to trade amongst or against their clients. They are likely to route your orders to their contractual marker makers first, in order to receive payments for the order flow. They then route your order to public exchanges only if none of their contractual marker makers would like to fill your order. And when they do this, they may have incentives to convert market orders into non-marketable limit orders, to avoid being charged by exchanges for removing liquidity. Although software bugs may exist, I do not believe Robinhood intentionally violates NBBO rules. Of course, this is purely my speculation based on my limited understanding on order routing and broker business.
【在 w*******d 的大作中提到】 : Robinhood 还敢用market order?他家的所有market order都是瞬时limit order, : limit price是在你的bid price上加了5%。所以你买到的基本都贵很多。 : Never use market order with robinhood.