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Robinhood Raises Another $2.4B from shareholders

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21–30 of 109 posts

Re: Robinhood Raises Another $2.4B from shareholders

#21

Imagine you found a number one trading platform and end up having to dilute your stake by a factor of 2 (or more likely) within a week because of a meme stock. I actually feel bad for the founding members at RH.

I feel bad for the employees. I always feel bad for the employees (as their equity is always most at risk compared to others on the cap table, from all forms of devaluation or inability to obtain liquidity). But their lottery ticket is no different then folks jumping into a meme stock except they got sold on the idea they had to work for theirs.

But the founders of Robinhood who built the Zynga of the capital markets? Not much empathy for them.

Re: Robinhood Raises Another $2.4B from shareholders

#22

Imagine you found a number one trading platform and end up having to dilute your stake by a factor of 2 (or more likely) within a week because of a meme stock. I actually feel bad for the founding members at RH.

On the other hand, though, they might have far more users than they ever anticipated if some of the new retail investors stick around. If their brand doesn't end up completely dead and buried, at least.

Re: Robinhood Raises Another $2.4B from shareholders

#23

Imagine you found a number one trading platform and end up having to dilute your stake by a factor of 2 (or more likely) within a week because of a meme stock. I actually feel bad for the founding members at RH.

Who knows how aware they were of it, but this didn't happen just this week or just because of a meme. They built the business to operate in a certain way and then let it grow without ensuring they had the capital reserves to sustain those operations.

Re: Robinhood Raises Another $2.4B from shareholders

#24

Imagine you found a number one trading platform and end up having to dilute your stake by a factor of 2 (or more likely) within a week because of a meme stock. I actually feel bad for the founding members at RH.

On the other hand, though, they might have far more users than they ever anticipated if some of the new retail investors stick around. If their brand doesn't end up completely dead and buried, at least.

I transferred all of my liquid capital out of RH this morning. I'm putting it back in Fidelity. I can live without the fancy interface; I cannot trust RH with my money or my business. And I didn't have that much there but once my positions are liquid I will be deleting RH.

Re: Robinhood Raises Another $2.4B from shareholders

#26
https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-08-09/s70809-407a.pdf Related: The Counterfeiting of Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac A. Counterfeiting Stocks Through Electronic Delivery Naked short selling is cute terminology developed by Wall Street to confuse the fact that this is simply a method of counterfeiting shares of U.S. publicly traded companies. At a speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. on November 16, 2007, former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt stated, ―Phantom shares created by naked shorting are analogous to counterfeit money.

A well known fact for SEC from decades.

Re: Robinhood Raises Another $2.4B from shareholders

#27
post #5

This is a fascinating game to watch. I watched The Big Short yesterday for the first time, as it's trending on Netflix and was suggested, and this moment feels similar to exposing a weakness in the system that needs to be addressed - and hopefully not to strengthen the wrong position; I didn't realize the incredible actors cast for it, obviously they took on the roles as it's an incredibly important story for the gen…

Yes. If you read what the ultimate intent of the /r/wallstreetbets crowd is, they're not just trying to exercise the same right to make money off of the financial system that billionaires have.

A year ago, the person that started this detected a situation where GME was a company that didn't have long term prospects, wasn't losing money, but was still shorted to 140% of it's value. It's not supposed to be possible to go over 100% any more since 2008, by the way.

Because of the shorting, he deduced that hedge funds and other influential people in the financial system were planning to encourage GME to go bankrupt, thus getting their short shares forgiven, because a bankrupt company is written off as a loss by the actual share owner.

So the hedge funds' plan was to short shares at some price as much as they could get away with, then make the shares worthless by encouraging bankruptcy. Since the shares would then be written off, they would pocket all the money they took from selling the shares they borrowed to short. Nice racket.

What WSB did is make the price go in the opposite direction, which is important for a lot of reasons, but one huge one is that the risk of shorting is proportional to the reward. If the price of a shorted stock goes up, then the borrower (person doing the short) still has to return it to the owner. No matter how high the price goes.

So they realized if they drive the price WAY up, then the people who were doing the 140% shorts on a company they planned to drive out of business would get screwed by their own system.

Some of the folks on WSB are making money and lots of it, but many of them just want to see the whole unfair system burn. By exploiting this weakness, they're trying to force the government to reform the whole finance industry.

Re: Robinhood Raises Another $2.4B from shareholders

#29
post #3

The stocks(GME) are still limited/restricted btw

That's correct. Additionally, Robinhood isn't the only one in a bind right now. TD Ameritrade has restricted a lot of options trading on a lot of these stocks, requiring you to call in to sell certain types of derivatives plays which have a level of risk but highly profitable for experienced traders. It's left a VERY sour taste in my mouth to know I have to call into a call center, and wait 90 minutes to speak to som…

FYI, eTrade is still allowing these trades. I sold a put on AMC just now.

Re: Robinhood Raises Another $2.4B from shareholders

#30
post #3

The stocks(GME) are still limited/restricted btw

That's correct. Additionally, Robinhood isn't the only one in a bind right now. TD Ameritrade has restricted a lot of options trading on a lot of these stocks, requiring you to call in to sell certain types of derivatives plays which have a level of risk but highly profitable for experienced traders. It's left a VERY sour taste in my mouth to know I have to call into a call center, and wait 90 minutes to speak to som…

I have seen other people say that you must have a margin account to trade options, so maybe TDA has restricted all margin accounts.

Perhaps this is specific to Robinhood though.

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