SLASHING COSTS

Robinhood Axes Nearly a Quarter of Its Staff in Second Round of Layoffs This Year

The slowdown in the day-trading frenzy is apparently taking a toll.

For the second time this year, the trading platform Robinhood is culling its staff, this time by 23 percent. In a public blog posted on Tuesday, CEO Vlad Tenev blamed inflation, the crypto crash, and “the deterioration of the macro environment” for reducing trading activity by customers. The company had benefited from frenzied day-trading during the pandemic, in which retail investors piled into meme stocks like GameStop and AMC. “We staffed many of our operations functions under the assumption that the heightened retail engagement we had been seeing with the stock and crypto markets in the COVID era would persist into 2022,” Tenev wrote. In the end, that proved untrue.