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

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631–640 of 1001 posts

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

#631
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1354833285386543105

"Committee investigators should examine any retail services freezing stock purchases [...] especially those allowing sales, but freezing purchases."

Apparently she would prefer that people were blocked from selling their holdings.

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

#632

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…

> Can someone help me understand Robinhood's POV? Robinhood is a margin-lending options-trading broker. If a customer falls down on a trade, it is ultimately liable. If a retail customer loses money and makes a FINRA complaint that Robinhood induced them to buy through its gameified interface, it is liable. Risk and compliance likely made this call. Also, Robinhood makes its revenue from market makers. They are the c…

> What I can guarantee is nobody shorting GameStop got Robinhood to pull the plug.

Not sure how you could possibly gaurantee that. Also given that Robinhood edit got a huge chunk of cash from a shorter makes that pretty weird to "guarantee"[1]

[1] https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHS%20SEC%2..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945258

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

#633
post #7

Interactive Brokers now blocking purchase call and put options (even to institutional investors!) on $GME, you can only close a position. On the other side, Robinhood is asking for account to be funded with cash to execute the calls at expiration, or else they will liquidate your position :|

this is a risk management move for RH, nothing else

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

#636

If they were just blocking margin trading or trades with unlimited risk that would be one thing. But this smacks of either paternalism or trying to manipulate the market. I hope they lose a lot of customers (or product depending on your POV).

I'm pretty happy they are doing it. This is really in the best interest of the average Robinhood user trying to buy GME right now. Maybe they shouldn't completely ban it, but there should be at least very extreme warnings about why its a terrible idea to buy.

Dude it's my fuckin' money. I don't need or want protection. Maybe I want to buy a couple hundred dollars of meme stonks solely because it's funny. Is that not allowed?

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

#637
Here's the part of this that is actually worse than it seems at first:

RH is making it so you can ONLY sell the stocks. You can't buy them.

So who is on the other side of the trade? Definitely not anybody on RH. But the thing is: a lot of the retail buy side of this is coming from RH. Like RH just gutted the buyers and handed them to the sellers. It's unbelievable how corrupt this looks.

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

#638

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…

> Can someone help me understand Robinhood's POV? Robinhood is a margin-lending options-trading broker. If a customer falls down on a trade, it is ultimately liable. If a retail customer loses money and makes a FINRA complaint that Robinhood induced them to buy through its gameified interface, it is liable. Risk and compliance likely made this call. Also, Robinhood makes its revenue from market makers. They are the c…

> If a customer falls down on a trade, it is ultimately liable.... Robinhood induced them to buy through its gameified interface

Why would robinhood be any more liable than other online traders like Fidelity or etrade?

> What I can guarantee is nobody shorting GameStop got Robinhood to pull the plug.

How can you guarantee that? Robinhood likely routes most of it's trades through citadel, which has informed partners it will not be fulfilling GME or AMC or BB trades.

And it turns out Citadel is also a hedge fund that has massive short positions on GME.

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

#639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely paternalism, IMO. I'm less sure whether I think it's a good thing or not (because I think people buying new positions in GME at this point are unlikely to end up happy about that in mid-Feb.) I'm all for "let 'em play" in general but this is not going to end well for a lot of folks...

I ended up buying a couple stocks late in the game, fully expecting to lose the money. First, it's not my retirement or long-term cash, more of a hobby. And that hobby quickly turned into sending a message after watching those rich SOBs literally cry about being hurt by the free market, and then try and end/manipulate it to their advantage.

You are probably an outlier. Look at the average newbie on WSB. Look at the upvoted posts and comments. It is pure mania at this point.

I promise a ton of people are convinced this is their ticket and throwing in far more than play money.

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

#640

Sure. Robinhood got a call from someone very powerful in their circle, politely asking them to stop the amateur plebes from interfering with their professional market manipulation. We are taking about people commanding titanic amounts of capital and (indirect) regulatory power. Robinhood then had the choice, do we make enemies out of these people or do we just screw, er, I mean protect, our customers? Unburdened by a…

Only a small fraction of RH's customers bought into the fantasy they are fighting some kind of revolution against hedge funds (or that 'the smoking man' paid them a visit in the night...). The vast majority don't care about any of these stocks. Also, by making trading so easy RH has a responsibility to protect amateur investors from making terrible financial decisions. If you really want to buy game stop stock or wha…

> Also, by making trading so easy RH has a responsibility to protect amateur investors from making terrible financial decisions.

I strongly disagree with this. Nobody can know beforehand what is a good investment or not. The omnipresent disclaimer applies: "All investments involve risks, including the possible loss of capital."

The idea that the professionals know something that the rest of us don't, is quite controversial and there are many articles giving evidence to the contrary.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234025489_The_Activ...

This idea is also quite condescending (my own opinion, no references given).

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