Free Republic

Now new research released Wednesday has shed light on this trading frenzy and concluded that a change in how Robinhood and other online brokers report fractional trading data was a culprit. “This volume is due to the interaction of a well-intentioned but misguided FINRA reporting rule, Robinhood trading, and fractional shares,” wrote the authors — Robert Bartlett at University of California, Berkeley, Justin McCrary at Columbia University and Maureen O’Hara at Cornell University. In 2017, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority started requiring brokers to report fractional trades — sometimes just 1/100th of a share — as if they were for...