24 connected strategy for asian wealth management ^Top trade — zero, they have likely not benefited most of their users overall. A recent study27 found that “large increases in Robinhood users are often accompanied by large price spikes and are followed by reliably negative returns”, reinforcing prior research that day traders under-perform benchmarks and/or lose money net of their transaction costs. In addition, Robinhood has also started to dial back some of its features that gamify investing for DIY traders such as celebratory digital confetti28. All this has been against the backdrop of a historic run-up in the US equity markets. If market conditions become more challenging and a large proportion of new investors build self-directed, higher risk positions, this may have an adverse impact on their financial circumstances and their willingness to participate in equity markets over time. Furthermore, a business model geared mainly towards self-directed trading or financial speculation is likely to run into the challenges of its “addictive and harmful” aspects29 for consumers as well as the earnings volatility associated with a revenue stream reliant on a high level of transactional activity that, in turn, relies on the continued upward move- ment of markets. For example, in the case of Robinhood, its customers did an average of 30 trades each or over 120 on an annualized basis, roughly twice the rate at Charles Schwab30. Criteria to test the efficacy and connectedness of a firm’s ‘respond-to-desire’ experience ¨ Is the execution frictionless? (e.g., lowest time to place a trade, # of clicks to trade, # of fields to fill) ¨ Is the execution the lowest cost? (e.g., cost per trade, cost vs. other players, % human involvement) ¨ Is the journey tuned to the sophistication of the user or ‘one size fits all’? (e.g., UI-NX considerations) ¨ Is the journey constantly enhanced by learning from the user’s behaviors? (e.g., continued optimization of the number of steps and sequence in the journey based on the usage analytics) ¨ Is there a connected data feed on the users’ preferences and behaviors to build a data moat? 27 “Attention-Induced Trading and Returns: Evidence from Robinhood Users”, Brad Barber et. al., Oct 2020 28 “Robinhood is removing its confetti celebrations ahead of its IPO”, The Verge, 2021 29 “The conceptual and empirical relationship between gambling, investing, and speculation”, Jennifer Arthur, et. al., 2016 30 “What is Robinhood?”, Marc Rubenstein, 2021