Aswath Damodaran: When So Called Pros Bet And Make Money It’s Skill, When Robinhood Investors Make Money It’s Speculation. Why?

In this interview with CNBC, Aswath Damodaran highlighted the hypocrisy of commentary coming from so called professional investors and market commentators towards Robinhood investors, some of which have been generating outsized returns. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Q: Robinhood often gets the focus here especially because they’re part of this trend of allowing investors to buy fractions of a share of stock. So you don’t have to plunk down a thousand plus dollars to get a share of Amazon. Is that really having an effect here or is that overstated?

Damodaran: I think it’s vastly overstated collectively the amount of money that these Robinhood investors are investing cannot make the market change.

I think it’s an easy excuse for the so-called pros, I’m gonna say so-called pros, because there’s nothing professional about investing pros and how they approach, many of them approach investing. It’s an easy excuse of them saying look you know we were right they were wrong. It’s amazing how when they bet, the pros bet and make money, it’s skill, but when Robinhood investors bet and make money it’s speculation.

I mean come on you know what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

You can watch the entire interview here: