The money it gets in return. When asked how much money it makes from Citadel Securities, Robinhood referred to its public disclosures of payment for order flow contracts. It said it didn’t have any contracts covering customer order execution with other hedge funds or private equity firms.
Ms. Warren’s response: “What’s still not clear from Robinhood’s response to my questions is the full extent of Robinhood’s ties to giant hedge funds and market makers. I’m going to keep pushing regulators to use the full range of their regulatory tools to ensure the fair operation of our markets, particularly for small investors.”
Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s C.E.O., and Ken Griffin, Citadel’s C.E.O., will be among those testifying at a congressional hearing tomorrow.
Exclusive: Ariel sees a trillion-dollar opportunity for minority-owned businesses
Ariel Investments, the Chicago-based asset management firm, will today announce an initiative to scale minority-owned businesses by positioning them as preferred suppliers to the nation’s largest companies. Project Black, as the initiative is known, comes with a $200 million commitment from JPMorgan Chase. It will be run by a new affiliate of the firm, Ariel Alternatives, and led by Leslie Brun, an Ariel board member and founder of the investment firm Hamilton Lane.
It started with a call from Jamie Dimon, who asked fellow JPMorgan board member Mellody Hobson, Ariel’s co-C.E.O., for thoughts on how to help Black-owned businesses. The result, Project Black, considered what Fortune 500 companies currently spend with minority-owned suppliers — around 2 percent of their total procurement. It also looked at what this could be worth if businesses meet their pledges to spend more with these suppliers, typically 10 to 15 percent, as part of corporate America’s racial reckoning. Ms. Hobson estimates that the opportunity is worth about $1 trillion.
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“The pledges are fantastic, but they’re going to be very hard to meet,” Ms. Hobson said, because there are not enough minority-owned businesses of sufficient size to meet demand.
Project Black will acquire suppliers to Fortune 500 companies, whether or not they are minority-owned. As Ariel grows these companies into “sustainable, scalable, long-lived providers, at the tier-one level,” Mr. Brun said, it will tap its network to bring in new executives as needed and convert the firms into certified minority-owned business enterprises.