We study brokerage platform outages to examine the impact of retail investors on financial markets. We contrast outages at Robinhood, which caters to inexperienced investors, with outages at traditional retail brokers. For stocks with high retail interest, we find that negative shocks to Robinhood investor participation are associated with reduced market order imbalances, increased market liquidity, and lower return volatility, whereas the opposite relations hold following outages at traditional retail brokerages. The findings suggest that herding by inexperienced investors can create inventory risks that harm liquidity in stocks with high retail interest, while other retail trading improves market quality.

我们研究经纪平台中断，以检查散户投资者对金融市场的影响。我们将迎合经验不足的投资者的 Robinhood 的中断与传统零售经纪商的中断进行对比。对于具有高零售兴趣的股票，我们发现对 Robinhood 投资者参与的负面冲击与市场订单失衡减少、市场流动性增加和回报波动性降低有关，而在传统零售经纪公司中断后，相反的关系仍然存在。研究结果表明，缺乏经验的投资者的从众行为可能会产生库存风险，从而损害具有高散户兴趣的股票的流动性，而其他散户交易则提高了市场质量。