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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

#641

Post by isoprophlex »

simias wrote: post #575
zarkov99 wrote: post #57

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…

While what you say is plausible, can't it also simply be that they saw a gigantic portion of their userbase making these incredibly risky bets and they were worried that it'd end up blowing in their face?

WSB have been yoloing their trades since forever.

This is some anticompetitive bullshit, plain and simple.

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

#642

Post by ehsankia »

Dem_Boys wrote: post #38

This whole Game Stop situation has made the power of the rich so obvious and disgusting. They temporarily shut down the market, banned the discord server, and are now preventing people from buying stocks on the most popular app used by small time investors. All of these moves hurt the small time investor trying to cash in on the next bitcoin-like bubble. This just creates more division, more disgust, and more of a cl…

Were the market shutdowns manual or automatic handbrakes? I know there are breaks when specific thresholds are hit that are pre-determined.

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

#643

Post by rayhendricks »

zarkov99 wrote: post #57

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…

Yeah there’s something going on here. But they don’t realize that the Streisand effect will be or in full force in this. People are going to freak.

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

#644

Post by tylerhou »

marricks wrote: post #632
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The same shorter is making money hand over fist on market making due to increased volatility, volume, and unsophisticated investors.

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

#645

Post by MrMan »

diveanon wrote: post #363
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #129

I’m fuming, and about as angry as I’ve been in years because of this. Robinhood opened up a bunch of levered trading to amateurs, that was fine! Allowing folks to buy stocks that are making their business partners lose cash: we’re protecting the little guy. If you work at Robinhood and you continue working at Robinhood I don’t know how you’ll continue to sleep at night.

Their paychecks can buy some very nice mattresses. RH has been a scam since day one, the very principle of it is virtue signaling to the common man to sell his data to front run his trades. I'm sure none of these people will lose a wink of sleep.

yeah Robin Hood was a creepy cynical marketing play from the start. good on them for convincing young people that they were a good choice despite being objectively worse than all other brokers. it's the free market at work! go use another broker if you dont like RH, trading fees have plummeted everywhere it's a years-long trend due to market regulation changes and HFT and low interest rates

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

#646

Post by programmertote »

spookthesunset wrote: post #607
snowwrestler wrote: post #187

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…

> Not everyone buying GME today understands the social movement /r/wsb angle. I mean read the top comments in the top WSB posts today. It ain’t about sticking it to the man. It’s about making money, fast.

Agree. My cynical mind like to think that there are a lot more people there who just want to make a quick buck and maybe get rich quick. Those people, who most likely bought GME early on, are hyping up the "hold strong on GME" motto and they will silently leave the fools to hold the burden. Whether it's sticking it to the Wall Street or not (actually, it's only affecting maybe a handful of hedge funds on Wall Streets; the big guys on Wall Streets are probably making a lot of money from this "movement"), A LOT of average Joe's will lose money here as well.

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

#647

Post by subsubzero »

I called out Robinhood months ago in this old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188407

basically its a shitty company that sells your orders so hedgefunds (citadel etc.) can then buy the same stocks at a lower price[1] and you always end up paying more, they were fined 65M for doing this see here[1]. A total scam and hopefully congress and the SEC come down hard on this company.

[1] - https://modernconsensus.com/technology/robinhood-high-freque... [2] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robinhood-sec-fine-65-million/

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

#648

Post by spookthesunset »

noncoml wrote: post #54
sokoloff wrote: post #13

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...

Why are you so quick to assume that people don’t know what they are doing? Is it so hard to believe that at this point buying GME is more about activism than making profit? “When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose”

> Is it so hard to believe that at this point buying GME is more about activism than making profit?

Go read the top comments in the top WSB threads and tell me which it is.

This is all about getting rich quick with a thin veneer of activism slapped on top.

That might not have been the case a few days ago, I don’t know because I only got into the loop yesterday... but if it was 90% activism on Monday... is probably 10% activism today.

I wouldn’t touch that stock using “for real” money with a 50 foot pole.

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

#649

Post by GizmoSwan »

vmception wrote: post #608
wyldfire wrote: post #26

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’s actual customer is Citadel. Citadel was funding the short sells, investing directly into Melvin Capital, for example. Robinhood did not act against its customers. Its users are their product, which it sells to Citadel. As you see now, this is way more than an edgy quip: when its free you are the product.

I just want to know how do you know for sure what those guys have been doing. Have they exposed all their trades? Are you saying that they were so stupid to not have hedged it?!

This is a hedge fund's game as it is for WSB.

It is the regular traders that have shorted via option that are losing money just the same. They are the most likely bag holders because they they don't hedge.

Don't assume all parties are truthful.

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

#650

Post by balls187 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #187
wyldfire wrote: post #26

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…

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…

> When the crisis hit, the firms got the blame, not their customers. Companies learned that helping their customers shoot themselves in the foot can come back to bite them, even if it was all legal and what customers wanted at the time.

That is a pretty gross oversimplification and completely dismisses the variety of "companies" that had a hand.

Subprime lending was just the foundation, but it took investors to investors to buy those securities, and ratings agencies to assign favorable risk ratings to those securities.

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