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Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

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Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

#161
I could see how a regulator can peg Wall Street Bets as some vague case of market manipulation, but this is a whole new level. They're closing the public out of the public markets. There's really no formal argument to support this. What, the stock price is overvalued because of concentrated investments propping it up? That's pretty much most of the market.

Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

#162
post #9

This sort of stuff will put people more and more on edge, there is the deplatforming going on, people asserted their power financially, and now getting that removed too, the powers that rule USA don't realize that soon the only tool left to common people is violence? Even more with some irresponsible newspapers blaming the whole thing on GamerGate and Alt-Right, effectively pushing away people that previously could b…

HN admins will ban this thread in 3...2...

Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

#164

Wow. First the Discord ban and then this - clearly the billionaire hedge fund managers have been busy pulling strings overnight. Limiting it so you can't buy, you can only sell... Very clearly helping the hedge funds here.

Citadel is one of the "cheater" funds along with Melvin, Point72 (previously SAC Capital Advisers) and Maplelane (ex-Galleon Group). They all have connections to insider trading of some sort since it was legal to know stuff like earnings beforehand, etc. before reg FD in 2001, and the seeds from that age are still there in these funds. They certainly aren't the type to be below doing something like this.

Citadel could also be absolutely fucking themselves if they end up in discovery over this. It could mean the end of this era of funds. Many would be glad to see them go.

Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

#165

Can someone help me understand Robinhood's POV? This just seems so outrageous that there must be some sane rationale that I'm not seeing. Why do Robinhood, Reddit, Discord, etc feel like they have to respond to this? Whether the investments being made are responsible or not, it doesn't seem like it should be their place to intervene. If the hedge funds over-shorted GME and WSB recognized that and traded against that…

As far as I understand it robinhood makes (most of their?) money from selling their order flow to hedge funds.

Which is not remotely illegal, and most brokers do the same thing, except they used to charge people to buy and sell as well but now just make money from order flow. In fact market makers have always been involved in stock sales to ensure a fluid market; none of this is new. What is new is that buying and selling stocks costs you nothing, so there is no barrier to anyone to put money in or take it out. While everyone thinks it's a great thing, it's no different that allowing free communication in exchange for your personal data (ie Facebook) instead of requiring you to pay to communicate via mail or phone or plan things in person. Free always has a cost; in this case free involve scads of money changing hands with the folks at the end holding the bag, and anyone can pump the market to ensure they make a profit, and someone else takes a loss.

Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

#166

Can someone help me understand Robinhood's POV? This just seems so outrageous that there must be some sane rationale that I'm not seeing. Why do Robinhood, Reddit, Discord, etc feel like they have to respond to this? Whether the investments being made are responsible or not, it doesn't seem like it should be their place to intervene. If the hedge funds over-shorted GME and WSB recognized that and traded against that…

Robinhood allows free trades. With all the new customers loging in and just buying a few stocks, they have to acquire lots of new shares. When this is all over, a lot of retail investors are going to be left holding the bag, and will likely not be continuing customers.

The opposite is true:

The idea behind these trades is that they will not in fact suffer any losses because they bought in after the naked shorts brought the stock down to a low valuation. If they keep the stock high enough, long enough, the naked shorts will have to buy back the stock at much higher prices than the price was when this short squeeze was started. That's why short squeezes are a thing in the first place. This is no different than what Carl Icahn did to herbalife and Bill Ackman.

When companies keep these people from implementing their strategy, they expose these individuals(their own customers) to potential huge losses.

Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

#167

Can someone help me understand Robinhood's POV? This just seems so outrageous that there must be some sane rationale that I'm not seeing. Why do Robinhood, Reddit, Discord, etc feel like they have to respond to this? Whether the investments being made are responsible or not, it doesn't seem like it should be their place to intervene. If the hedge funds over-shorted GME and WSB recognized that and traded against that…

I think it's BS to stop people trading but...

You can make a good argument that WSB are engaged in market manipulation. RobinHood don't want to be the broker for that for a whole myriad of reasons.

Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

#169
im just so worried this is textbook bolshevism.

the narrative that the evil corporate oligarchs are ruining peoples lives is certainly rooted in truth, but it is not true enough that people need to die about it.

these people with their FREE stock trading platforms browsing reddit all day with their $500-$2000 smart phones AND computers, feel like life is unfair. they feel repressed (because there is certainly >0 repression occurring), but have no idea how deep this rabbit hole is. the single mothers with 4 kids arent on WSB. the mentally ill, the 75 year olds that lost pensions, the drug addicted, the slumlords, the victims of being poor in ghettos - none of the people with real problems are WSB players.

once people with actual problems get involved, all these kulaks are gonna realize how much they have to lose.

Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of Robinhood's main business partner is Citadel (RH sells their order flow to Citadel). Citadel is also the firm that has bailed out Melvin Capital, one of the hedge funds that took a huge short position in GME. Probably just a coincidence.

I keep seeing this pop up everywhere; Citadel != Citadel Securities

And Alphabet != Google! /s
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