from Hacker News

20-Year-Old Robinhood Customer Dies by Suicide After a $730k Negative Balance

by shawnMer on 6/18/20, 8:04 AM with 23 comments

  • by wmeredith on 6/18/20, 11:25 AM

    “In fact, a screenshot from Kearns’ mobile phone reveals that while his account had a negative $730,165 cash balance displayed in red, it may not have represented uncollateralized indebtedness at all, but rather his temporary balance until the stocks underlying his assigned options actually settled into his account.”

    How the hell is this a thing? Who approved this UI?

  • by magicalhippo on 6/18/20, 11:26 AM

    Here in Norway, had the loss actually been real, he could have declared personal bankruptcy and moved on with his life. From what I can see the US has something similar, though I'm not sure how effective it is?

    Tragic event regardless, and a stark reminder to us programmers that we should always keep in mind what exactly we're doing, what are we telling the users, what are we letting the users do.

  • by rjkennedy98 on 6/18/20, 12:41 PM

    Except for possibly commodities what is the purpose of these options. So far as I can tell it’s just gambling. Guessing whether a stock price will be slightly higher in a few weeks isn’t investing. These people aren’t doing due diligence and reading through prospectuses and understanding the proper value of the companies. They are just reading r/wallstreetbets and literally gambling on popular stocks. How does this do anybody any good? It just produces a few people who get massively lucky and a lot of people who lose everything. Neither one deserves their outcome and we are all worse off for it.

  • by battery423 on 6/18/20, 1:03 PM

    Its really unfortunate that we have a mental model as default which makes suicide the first choice.

    Living should be better/easier then not living.

    I do wanna make clear, that suicide well thought of and for a clear reason, is still a valid thing and everyone of us should have control over their own lifes.

  • by gowld on 6/18/20, 12:30 PM

    This seems to clearly be a case of a person who succumbed to pre-existing mental health troubles, not someone driven to desperation by (the appearance of) financial troubles.

    That said, Robinhood is evil.

    > shower of colorful confetti Robinhood routinely deploys after customers make trades.

  • by bradstewart on 6/18/20, 1:34 PM

    I've never used Robinhood--does it allow option trading by default?

    I had to fill out all sorts of paperwork informing my brokerage that I was aware of the risks, etc before ANY option trading was available. And they still only provided a small margin line at first, with a note saying they would increase it after I traded more options and they were sure I knew what I was doing.

  • by detaro on 6/18/20, 1:37 PM

    dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553794 and others linked there