from Hacker News

Robinhood will fail again: stock trading is broken

by jaredeklee13 on 7/29/21, 5:13 PM with 109 comments

  • by gruez on 7/29/21, 6:46 PM

    >Robinhood users could not sell their GameStop positions while trading was frozen, a particularly difficult situation for those traders who borrowed money to purchase the stock.

    This is false. You could close positions (ie. sell), just not open new positions.

    https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/keeping-customers-...

    >In light of recent volatility, we restricted transactions for certain securities to position closing only.

  • by optimalsolver on 7/29/21, 7:04 PM

    The fact that so many of the bandwagoners didn't understand what a margin call is proves that Robinhood was right to save them from themselves.

  • by zz865 on 7/29/21, 7:08 PM

    Robinhood walks a really fine line between a reputable broker and legalized gambling. There isn't much difference between Robinhood app and a casino app. I'm surprised they have been allowed to turn stock trading into a game.

  • by brokenbrokers on 7/29/21, 7:19 PM

    One reason why we made http://brokenbrokers.com/ is because brokers are so unreliable. Nearly once a week, outages prevent individuals from trading DURING TRADING HOURS.

    In one poll conducted in the FinTwit community, about 70% of individuals said they could not trade because of an outage at some point. Wild.

    We're hoping to bring light to this issue, and hold brokers responsible.

  • by edoceo on 7/29/21, 6:57 PM

    Critical observation:

    ""The risk of a single centralized party was realized at the worst possible time when the system could least tolerate it.""

    I can't believe our SPOF actually F-ed!!

    As is tradition.

  • by ForHackernews on 7/29/21, 7:00 PM

    Reminder that Robinhood are the folks who wrote the "infinite money cheat code" bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKXrVriacUM