3 charts for you today:
Robinhood, the trading platform popular with retail investors, has long touted its mission to "democratize finance". The company's main focus — and what it's been known for — is making it easy for retail investors to trade stocks, and some complicated financial derivatives, right from their phone. But, increasingly, that's not how Robinhood makes its money.
Stocks are...boring?
Robinhood did $451m in transaction-based revenue last quarter, more than half of which ($233m) was from users trading cryptocurrencies. Just $52m was from trading vanilla equities (stocks and shares), while $165m was from options trading, which are usually a much higher-risk instrument, that can be significantly more complicated to understand.
But the most worrying stat was that 62% of the cryptocurrency trading revenue was from the specific trading of Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that was originally designed as a satirical joke on the speculative trading of other cryptocurrencies. Ironic.
Not so fast
So on the surface, Robinhood is growing really, really fast. In its most recent quarter, transaction-based revenue jumped 141% year-on-year. However, if you strip out cryptocurrency entirely, then Robinhood's transaction revenue grew at a much more sedentary 20% year-on-year. For good or bad, a bet on Robinhood is increasingly a bet on crypto.
The total number of people incarcerated in the US has fallen again, with just under 2.1 million people in prison or jail as of 2019. That's the lowest count since the peak of 2.3 million in 2008. When adjusted for population the fall is even more substantial, with the incarceration rate per 100,000 adults now at its lowest for 24 years (810 inmates for every 100,000 adults).
How the pandemic affected the justice system is not yet clear (data for 2020 is not yet out), but longer term declines in crime rates and arrest rates have likely contributed to the shrinking prison population.
Coming down, but still high
Although the US incarceration rate has fallen recently, the US remains the prison capital of the world — incarcerating people at a higher rate than any other country on Earth. Data from World Prison Brief, which measures inmates relative to the entire population (not just adults), pegs the US incarceration rate at about 639 per 100,000 people. That's higher than El Salvador (564), Turkmenistan (552), Rwanda (545) and Cuba (510) and about 6x the rate of Canada.
One of the (many) new buzzwords of the last 12 months has been "creator economy", as the pandemic accelerated the appeal of platforms that helped content creators make money remotely. Patreon was one of the earliest platforms serving that movement, starting in 2013 as a way for creators to charge their audience for content, which could be text, images, video or some combination of all 3.
But the pandemic saw the meteoric rise of OnlyFans — a similar service (kinda) except that the majority of OnlyFans creators make explicit adult content. Or at least, they used to, as OnlyFans announced yesterday that it will ban sexually explicit content, which is sure to blow up their current business model.
No funding for you
The name OnlyFans could be used a descriptor for the company's own funding options. As Axios pointed out in a timely piece this week, OnlyFans has struggled to secure funding from big institutions, presumably because of the nature of their content, despite some stunning operating metrics: OnlyFans did $2.2bn in Gross Merchandise Value, and expects $5.9bn this year.
Presumably the company is hoping to diversify into more family-friendly content, in order to attract investment in the future? We left a question mark there, because we're not entirely sure.
1) Toyota is planning to cut its global production by as much as 40% in September as the global microchip shortage continues to hamper supply chains.
2) The Ever Given container ship is set to travel back through the Suez Canal for the first time in 4 months. Last time it blocked global shipping traffic for nearly a week, and gave the internet plenty of meme material. No pressure, captain.
3) Facebook wants you to hold your next meeting in virtual reality. The company has unveiled "Horizon Workrooms" (video here), which reportedly allows you and your coworkers to "feel" like you are in a room together (if you all buy the VR headset you need to make it work).
4) You can help build the AI kitchen of the future! Invest in Miso Robotics today.*
5) More than 1 million acres have already burned in the California wildfire season so far this season. That puts 2021 ahead of last year's numbers for this time of the year, which itself was a record-breaking year.
6) On Wednesday we discussed Amazon vs. Walmart, and why the latter increasingly wants to get into e-commerce, only for Amazon to announce its building physical department stores. There's nothing new under the sun.
*This is sponsored content
