Robinhood replaced “call” and “put” with “up” and “down”

It's wrong because we don't want to simplify concepts to a level beneath the minimum information needed for understanding them. Call and Put specifically refer to what happens on maturity or exercise of the contract. You either call the stock from the counterparty, or you put it to the counterparty.

The only reason we don't refer to them as "buy" and "sell" options is because you can both buy and sell either of them. Nobody wants to shout into a phone "buy 10,000 AAPL Jan19 100 sells," and hope that the broker on the floor gets it right.

In actual fact, a call doesn't just represent "I think it will go up." Nor does the holder of a call always make money when the stock appreciates in value.

They are volatility products, and they decay with time. If you buy a put before a catalyst with a 9% implied move, and the stock drops 2%, you probably just lost money on event theta as the vol resets. How do you explain that a down option can lose money on a down move?

Giving a false sense of simplicity probably will tempt more folks into making losing trades on options.

Surely it can be both a casino for the ignorant and a necessary institution for the educated and intelligent.

The terms are out dated. I disagree with "up" and "down" because that is even more wrong (I'm up for buying that stock like I'm up for a game of chess, and I'm down to sell these like I'm down to go to the movies? Is that what they mean? Way too colloquial for my liking).

Just be more descriptive instead of trying to re-purpose other words. A "call" should be "Buy on Date", abbreviated to BOD, and a put should be "Sell on Date", or SOD. You don't even need to google what the means, you can immediately understand it when you read it.

The medical field is going through a similar renaming. Doctors in the early stages of modern medicine would discover something and name it after themselves. Oppenheimer Test? Wtf is that you egotistical douche, just call it the tibia tickle test.

Isn't tempting people into making losing trades the point, though? Robin Hood presumably has some way of profiting from trades which does not include directly charging people, such as commissions. So the more confused novices are, the more valuable they are as resources whose money can be systematically extracted by counterparties.

I don't think your analogy holds water, if only from the fact that "pass by reference vs value" is rooted in pointer knowledge, and is rather key to "not screwing up your app." (And as sister posts pointed out, messing up an app usually does not put ones finances on the line)

I also disagree with the core thrust of your post, but that's subjective so I'm listing this second. As someone who went from "financially clueless" to trading options over the last few years, I got to see my own mistakes firsthand, which were at least initially rooted in not understanding the implications of various vehicles and the patterns by which to use them, and that was even after quite a bit of time practicing in simulators.

No, I absolutely agree with the parent that there's a risk to not only trying to spoon-feed gambling (which is honestly how I see options, take it or leave it) under the guise of investing to uninformed consumers, but in splitting the jargon so a new entrant can't even easily bootstrap their knowledge by looking up the terms.

(I find it additionally funny to be arguing this, as I'm normally a staunch opponent to the Accredited Investor laws, but there's definitely a continuum between "keep poor people from using these vehicles" and "everyone and their grandmother can now shoot themselves in the foot without the most base validation that they know what they're getting into or have the tools to do so with eyes open")