Ebook pricing never really made sense to me. During college when I was buying textbooks, the ebooks on Amazon were frequently significantly more expensive than a new copy of the physical book. Not sure if that's still the case though.
Robinhood has truly disrupted the brokerage market. But I'm curious about their viability now that a ton of mainstream brokerage have also dropped commissions.
They are probably not viable. But that has nothing to do with their lack of commission fees. As Matt Levine has described [0], zero is the natural price for transaction fee.It's not like TD Ameritrade and Schwab are losing money now to compete with Robinhood.
Many banking packages in Canada have a low number of debit transactions (like 4 or 12 or 20) per month for free and charge a fee ($1–$2) after that. It's not like debit card transactions are costing them anything (they actually get transaction fees from merchants). But they can get away with it, so they do it. It's just another revenue stream. The natural price for an additional debit transaction is also free. If they drop the fee, I would not be worried at all about their viability.
They're not the only player. Webull is similar. I suspect they have plenty of revenue opportunities outside charging for brokerage, but I don't know the details.
Robinhood has truly disrupted the brokerage market. But I'm curious about their viability now that a ton of mainstream brokerage have also dropped commissions.