It’s hard to find two people who can better the retail boom than Vlad Tenev, co-CEO of popular online broker Robinhood, and Dave Portnoy, the careless founder of Barstool Sports, who began investing with the COVID pandemic closing. -19. the world of sports.
Portnoy interviewed Tenev on GameStop GME on Tuesday night,
the saga that has already been chewed by the House Financial Services Committee.
The interview began with a man named Davey Day Trader asking Tenev, wearing a Taco Tuesday hat, if he knows everyone hates his courage, because Robinhood’s decision to restrict trading in GameStop effectively ended the short run. from that transaction. Tenev was asked about the discrepancy between joining CNBC and denying the existence of a liquidity problem, then revealed in an interview days later that the brokerage was facing a $ 3 billion margin call at 3 o’clock in the morning.
Tenev said it was not, as Portnoy described it, a 180-degree change. “Reducing it to a liquidity problem survives it and subsidizes it simultaneously,” he said. Tenev said Robinhood was not the only company to limit trading in the GameStop video game store, AMC Entertainment’s AMC movie chain.
and other popular actions, calling it a “systemic problem.”
Asked no doubt if Robinhood would have regulated trading on GameStop and other popular Reddit shares without the phone call at 3 a.m., Tenev admitted he did not. “If we had a lot more space, we would probably let things go,” he said. Tenev also acknowledged that the company would have faced a liquidity problem – the next day – if it had not acted. Defending his CNBC interview, Tenev said he was “going up in smoke” as he struggled to raise $ 3.4 billion in capital to trade without restrictions.
Portnoy also insisted on Tenev whether Robinhood should have restricted sales as well as buying – so as not to crater stocks – to which Tenev replied that margin requirements would not have been helped by limiting sales. .
Watch the full interview here.
CNBC star Jim Cramer shared his views on the interview.