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Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

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Re: Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

#371
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeFi is a core component of my ETH bull hypothesis. All this decentralized activity requires the purchase of ETH to pay for/transact on.

Except for the fact that eth transaction fees are insane and will only increase if popularity does. DeFi is DOA.

No, DeFi will simply migrate to L2 solutions as they become viable.

Re: Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

#372

Just as I was wondering how many retail investors might be involved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947674 From the number of Playstore votes it seems quite a few? Will be interesting to see if it stays that way. Or if they can somehow cheat their way out of it and get all recent ratings deleted or something. Any guesses?

Optimally the result is Robin Hood is removed from the play and apple store for willfully defrauding their customers. Very real damages were suffered as a result of their willful actions. There was no warning and there was no way they did not know harm would come. Also if no retail traders could buy, who was buying the shares that they were forced to sell? If it was the short hedge funds, that has got to be a crimina…

It's a bubble. Bubbles pop. Robinhood's argument would be that they prevented harm to investors by preventing them from putting money into a bubble that was going to pop anyway. As soon as this hit the news you got all kinds of regular people wanting to get in on the action, not connected to WSB.

Re: Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how often the term 'oversight' is used vs 'regulation' when these guys are talking. Is that how we're determining efficacy now...? Semantics? I take it that you like FINRA because of the R in the name.

What? My point is that they see themselves as mall cops observing and reporting, not actively regulating behavior. That makes a pretty big difference in efficacy.

What you said was that they often use the word "observe" rather than "regulate," and that this is somehow reflective of the way they do their jobs. That's a purely semantic viewpoint and a ridiculous way to judge the efficacy of any regulator.

In actual fact, they use the term "enforcement action." Here's their report from 2020. See for yourself:

https://www.sec.gov/files/enforcement-annual-report-2020.pdf

Re: Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood how a slippery slope argument is a fallacy, let alone a logical fallacy (like false syllogism or no true scotsman). The idea is essentially looking at current trends and extrapolating into the future. No prediction is necessarily correct, but it's not necessarily wrong either.

When you do it, it's the slippery slope logical fallacy. When I do it, it's logical induction, a necessary component of reasoning about the world.

But if everyone started correctly applying logical induction for every piece of reasoning, we'd all become mindless robotic automata, hardly better than giant abacuses, and art, hope and love would die.

Re: Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

#375

Apple is blocking ratings of Robinhood on AppStore. Coincidence much ? "Its a big club and you ain't in it" - George Carlin

Opinion: With such wild swings in emotion in the markets right now in general, you can't expect investment app ratings to be even remotely objective. IMO Apple is making proactive moves to protect their store's rating system reputation, such as it is. I've used RobinHood since 2016 (not my only brokerage) and the app continues to be fine. It's not a race car, it's more like a family sedan. The company has been reason…

"Apple is making proactive moves to protect their store's rating system reputation"

Ah, that's a good one.

Re: Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, because that's been working great thus far.

Well no, the US hasn't been enforcing its existing antitrust laws very rigorously, that's the point the GP is making. E.g. see https://www.antitrustinstitute.org/work-product/antitrust-en... Rather than proposing a new technological solution to the problem ("platforms to protocols") which may work but is unproven, we could simply restart the use of existing tools that have been proven to work. This has the advantage…

If I have a car that worked great 50 years ago but haven't been able to turn it on since the 70s when my neighbor destroyed the engine, I would not call that a proven, working car.

The "existing tools" have been proven to have a major weakness, namely they can be neutered by regulatory capture. Unless you can get everyone to magically forget how they circumvented the rules last time, you can't simply restart using them.

Re: Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe make Protecting free speech part our governments highest law. Maybe we could amend the law. Seriously. Lots of people love to dump on the constitution as old and not relevant. But it’s meant to restrict government and protect people’s freedom.

I'm not sure if you were trying to be sarcastic, but to your last point; I think it is overlooked (intentionally or not) that the Constitution is already a set of laws and the highest laws at that. The "Bill of Rights" is not what people have been misled to believe, a list of rights you have and are given by government. In fact, they are the bill of laws that restrain the government from infringing on the natural God…

I'm sorry, is it an inalienable human right to use other people's property to spread speech now? When did that happen?

Re: Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

#378
post #23

When retail in traders en masse decide that a trading platform is impinging upon their rights, the SEC should be obligated to open an investigation. Isn't this pretty much a major component of their intended purpose?

I have a bit of knowledge from friends who work in fintech, and the sentiment among fintech companies seems to be that SEC doesn't matter. The fine is small and comes way too late. You can simply account for an approximate future fine and move forward with your shady business.

This will probably be my least popular post ever, but the explanation needs to get out there for why Robinhood stopped trading on GME.

Selling a stock short is NOT illegal. It is a perfectly valid type of investment according to the SEC:

“D. Are short sales legal? Although the vast majority of short sales are legal, abusive short sale practices are illegal. For example, it is prohibited for any person to engage in a series of transactions in order to create actual or apparent active trading in a security or to depress the price of a security for the purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of the security by others. Thus, short sales effected to manipulate the price of a stock are prohibited.”

Basically – you can’t short sell a stock to manipulate the price down so you can buy a lot more of it later. If you believe a stock is overpriced and short sell it, that is legal. That is exactly what tons of retail traders and hedge funds do every day, including on Gamestop.

On the other hand, manipulating a stock price upwards to cause a short squeeze IS illegal according to the same SEC article:

“Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal.”

Unprecedented numbers of people on Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere collaborated to intentionally create a short squeeze on GME in the last week. No one talked about a fundamental case why Gamestop the company was worth a lot of money and would be successful in the future; instead everyone made the argument that due to a very high short interest of 100%+, that a short squeeze would send the price “to the moon”. That is illegal according to the SEC.

Multiple brokerages, especially Robinhood, probably had their attorneys tell them that “Hey, you are aiding and abetting illegal activity by enabling a short squeeze and could be liable criminally or civilly if you continue to allow this blatant illegal activity on your platform”. So they decided to stop it by only allowing people to close their positions rather than open new ones in support of the short squeeze.

Another strong reason is that if the short squeeze caused the GME stock to go to 5000 in a sudden leap, tons of traders (both retail and professional) could instantly go broke, and then the brokerage (Robinhood) would be left holding the bag. For example, picture a retail investor with a Robinhood account had sold call options in the amount of $100,000 and their account was worth $200,000. If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000. Now multiply that by thousands of accounts…. no brokerage wants to take the risk of being bankrupted, so they shut it down.

The two strong reasons Robinhood and other brokers stopped trading was to prevent legal liability from enabling illegal activity on their platform, and for wanting to avoid potentially massive banktuptcy from traders unable to cover their losses.

Re: Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective, you just flipped the purpose of 1A. Right now you have the right to associate or disassociate with whomever you like (protected classes aside). In your altered future, the government forces churches to allow atheists and rival religions to be allowed to speak at the church, despite the desires of the owners and congregation. It would effectively be compelled association.

Nonsense. Trouble is when government gives out monopolies, or supporting monopolies they like. Government currently closed side. Government has chosen atheism as its religion. Very hostile toward other religions. Everyone pays for government school, but want to a Christian education, then you have to pay twice.

>Everyone pays for government school, but want to a Christian education, then you have to pay twice.

Work with your government to have you taxes assigned to the Christian school. Here in Ontario Canada when you file your taxes you select if your child is attending catholic school and the catholic school board gets revenue equal to the number of people attending.

Re: Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

#380
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Margin accounts have capital requirements. If you’re over leveraged, they will liquidate your positions to ensure you have capital. This is standard. If people didn’t know about this, they have no business with a margin account.

1. Robinhood accounts are all margin by default. Most novice investors don't know the difference. They should, but I would wager Robinhood doesn't spend a lot of time educating people about this. 2. Long positions (buying and holding stock) aren't leveraged. There is no capital risk to holding a stock. If the sales of GME are entirely based on other positions being underwater, then sure, but it seems at least some of…

https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/upgrading-to-go...

Robinhood let’s you borrow money to buy stocks. If you borrow $10k to buy GME at $300 and it dropped to $100. There’s a risk to RH that you won’t be able to payback the loan. RH most likely will liquidate the position before it even hits $100 to mitigate the risk on the loan depending how leveraged you are.

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