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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

#312
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…

>This is why I put academic fields adjacent to "identity politics" in the same category as climate change

This is why academic fields involved with "identity politics" are in the same class as "scientists" involved in climate change denial and questionable nutrition/smoking studies. Once there were academics involved in "critic theory" which more or less used Marxist level of analysis. A thorn in the side of the establishment. A branch within this field took the language of Marxism but replaced capitalist/working class with identities(e.g white men/minority women). Ofcourse those in power have supported this branch of critic theory and have gotten to the point where they even use it as a wedge issue. At this point this is the orthodox branch of "critic theory" and it's not because of intellectual merit.

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

#313
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the powers that rule USA don't realize that soon the only tool left to common people is violence? What's even more concerning to me is that, to platforms looking for an excuse, your comment could be painted as trying to "incite" violence, and used as a justification to ban you.

There's not any real reason to be concerned about this. Not yet, at least. Furthermore, this comment is offensive. Let's please not pretend that Facebook and Twitter were "looking for an excuse" before deplatforming Trump. They were entirely justified and would have been justified in doing so many years before they eventually did so. Let's also not put the word "incite" in dick quotes barely three weeks after an insu…

I put incite in "dick quotes" to emphasize that it has become the specific word with which to paint a comment _about_ violence when you don't like the message or the messenger, not to minimize or parody what happened on the 6th.

Calm down, Bud.

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

#314
What about robinhood's platform not being to handle the activity level and are concerned about their ability to execute all the trades while managing the book probably given their history on execution. Thus they had to limit purchases as they expected more surges and then a lot of risk on Friday settlement.

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

#315
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to make money in a bubble like this is to sell right before the pop. At some point the word will go out that it’s over—“we won”—and everyone will rush to sell their GME and take profits. It’s not possible for all those people to succeed. Broker apps like Robinhood will be absolutely overwhelmed with sell orders, many of which will run into technical problems and/or no counter parties. A lot of people are goin…

> many of which will run into technical problems If a broker has a technical problem processing a trade, they deserve to be blamed.

Seeing a comment like this on HN shows the risk here. If people here don’t understand the difficulty in scaling to meet huge spikes in demand, how are ordinary retail investors supposed to understand it?

It’s one thing to handle “a trade.” It’s another thing to handle everyone trying to trade at exactly the same second. We already saw broker apps have issues this week just on handling the buy volume. The sell volume will be far higher.

And I mentioned counterparties too. Even if the technology works, you can’t sell if everyone else is selling too.

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

#316
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard the talk that Robinhood website is an op by a financial fund called Citadel LLC. It may be considered market manipulation on their side well more solidly than some speculation on the internet, not to say a breach of brokerage contractual obligations.

Not quite. Citadel is a very well known quant hedge fund. The main way Robinhood makes money (and can let people trade without commission) is by selling their customers order flow (legally) to Citadel. Citadel (legally) uses this customer information to, in the milliseconds before the customer, front-run the trade, buy the shares and sell them to the Robinhood users at a marginal profit.

You got things a bit mixed up.

There's Citadel Asset Management, the quant hedge fund (which is probably the one that lent money to Melvin, though I'm not sure about that), and Citadel Securities the HFT / market-making show (they have the same owner).

HFT market-making using retail order flow isn't front-running - the price the customers get is the same regardless ("Best Bid Offer" as brokers are legally required to provide in the US). The difference is, once that the HFT market maker holds the stock, they can get rid of it more easily (i.e. they can close the trade) because (the assumption is that) the retail flow is "noise" (uncorrelated with future price movements) as opposed to professional/institutional traders (e.g. other hedge funds executing their strategies), where a big problem is negative selection (i.e. you're more likely to execute a trade with someone that has better information than you).

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the powers that rule USA don't realize that soon the only tool left to common people is violence? What's even more concerning to me is that, to platforms looking for an excuse, your comment could be painted as trying to "incite" violence, and used as a justification to ban you.

The WSB sub is almost certainly going to get banned by Reddit. Given the track record Reddit has of keeling over to public pressure, there is no way they are going to stand up to the SEC.

I can’t imagine a scenario where the SEC goes after reddit of all places.

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

#318
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…

If I were running a financial brokerage I'd totally do this, too. It's not a matter of "helping my hedge fund broker friends", it's a matter of "how do we keep the SEC off our backs". Remember: Robinhood is already being charged with securities law violation for giving their customers a raw deal on order execution. We usually don't see distributed market manipulation like this, but I wouldn't be surprised if a shitto…

> Does it feel good to get one up on a hedge fund idiot that was trying to manipulate GameStop the other way? Yes - but this is, at best, financial vigilantism.

Hedge funds do this to each other every day. Why is it suddenly wrong when it’s retail investors on the other side of the trade?

I truly do not understand the naïveté of arguments like these. Only the wealthy should be allowed to game the price of assets and rip each other off?

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

#319
post #158

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…

From Schawb “It is not uncommon for us to place restrictions on some transactions in certain securities in the interest of helping mitigate risk for our clients,” from Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth “It is very clear to anyone looking at the numbers that the whole marketplace is being manipulated here,” he said. I imagine Robinhood's thinking is similar

>> helping mitigate risk for our clients

It's cute when they phrase it like that, though everyone understands that it should be "chosen clients that make us most money"

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

#320
post #205

This is unbelievable. If there ever was a time to be outraged. This is naked corruption as usual hiding under the shabbiest veil of virtue. RobinHood traders can bankrupt and kill themselves, and that is fine, we will continue prodding them to trade more often, but once we get a call from one our hedge fund buddies, moaning about the rubes stopping him from raping another company, we will shut the rabble down.

It could also be RobinHood trying to avoid their traders bankrupting and killing themselves by restricting them from buying gamestop etc. shares at 10x what they are worth.

Robinhood explicitly disavows itself of that responsibility. Quoting from their literature:

> If you are interested in opening an account where you do not receive recommendations or advice about whether to buy or sell investments or investment strategies or account monitoring, and you make all of your own investment decisions, then a self-directed brokerage like ours could be the right fit for you. Robinhood Financial does not have account minimums for any brokerage accounts. Robinhood Financial does not provide recommendations. We are not subject to a fiduciary duty to you and do not monitor or manage your account, including the monitoring of brokerage account investments, unless we state otherwise in writing. Since we do not provide recommendations and you must make all of your own investment decisions, the licenses, education and other qualifications of our financial professionals will not be relevant to your investment decisions. Robinhood Financial professionals are available only to provide account support through an online email system. If you choose our services, you must be comfortable with investing your assets on your own.

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