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Comment by hbosch | Hacker News Reader

Also: anyone have an idea as to what regulations he is citing when he says if it drops below 50% he has to close the account? Is that a Robinhood thing, or an equities trading thing? As far as I know, there is no regulation limiting how much a person can lose on the market...

Makes me wonder if perhaps his account balance is $25k personal, and $25k matched by Robinhood for the stunt.

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The $50k is all mine. I was not given anything from Robinhood except for approximately $500 worth of free shares for referrals.

You can learn more of the $25k rule here: https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en-us/articles/217072366-Pa...

If I were Robinhoood, I'd try to be the facebook of financial startups- give every high school student a starting portfolio of fake stocks to manage through high school so they learn how to invest and manage money, then have avenues to have different "tabs" in their portfolio for real stocks they have gifted by family, and another for real ones they buy...

They can play with purchase what ifs in the stock sandbox, and plan and grow in the real tabs... among many many other things...

I did that with google finance about a decade ago and the financial crisis wiped me out. I wasn't even good at managing fake money.

Disclosure: I have started putting away some money in a vanguard Roth IRA now. I don't think about it too much because it is the minimum vtsax would let me invest anyways.

We were doing that in a high school course. Then 9/11 happened.

I suggested Delta.

A teammate asked his dad for a stock tip and invested the rest in a company none of us had ever heard of.

Delta popped back +25% or so over the next bit (from memory).

His company made some announcement and the stock doubled in value.

... I learned a lot about how the world works from that class.

In my middle school course when we played "the stock market game", I just picked a spread of reasonable stocks at the start. Every time we could rebalance our portfolio, I just read. I didn't care about the game. Got first or second in the class, and thus free pizza, for it. Kinda continuing that with in my current investment life; invest in index funds, walk away.

But is investing in stocks something you would want high school graduates to pick up?

I always thought of stock-picking as something that the average Joe should be careful with. Trading on less information than insiders and slowly being eaten by fees and taxes. It's an under EV game.

Besides that there's the wisdom of crowds that will eventually follow the trends and invest irrationally (pump and dump). That's how bubbles are created.

When I was in highschool, I was attempting to corner the market on commodities - specifically wheat!

Every day I would log in and manage my account - I was a commodities broker and I managed to build a pretty powerful little empire with my savvy transactions.

While not as powerful when it came to ore... my wheat holdings were no laughing matter... that was until the day I smoked pot, dialed in and accidentally sold all my wheat holdings as opposed to buying up all the other supply - thus eliminating my monopoly on the galactic wheat trade...

Man, Trade Wars was a blast in the early nineties.

That's an interesting story and I'm sure you learned a lot through the experience. I'm also sure there are plenty others like you, to whom trading was educative.

But on the other hand I'm sure there are a whole lot of young people on the other side of things. Those who start learning about stock-trading and soon see it as a way to make money fast by taking huge risks. They get spammed by 500$ signup bonuses to various stock-trading platforms, they're presented with 100x leveraged trading options and such. I don't see much benefit in that.

What I think is young people should be taught how the market works with a huge grain of salt. Definitely not by letting them go wild with play-money since we all know what will follow up.

Agreed, it's a fine line between investing and gambling, and much of it has to do with the length of time involved.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) in the U.S. established the "pattern day trader" rule, which states that if a stock trading customer makes four or more day trades (opening and closing a position within the same day) in a five-day period the customer is considered a day trader and must maintain a minimum $25,000 account balance.

https://www.finra.org/investors/day-trading-margin-requireme...

I think you need $25k to be a day trader on Robinhood. So if it drops below that he can't trade the same way he would unless he adds more cash which I guess he isn't prepared to do.

That's not just Robinhood. I'm not aware of any brokerage that lets you trade on the major U.S. markets with less than $25k.

Huh? You can open a Fidelity account with $2500, and buy any stock you want including US and Int'l markets.

Yes, but you can't do that four or more times in a period of five business days if it accounts for over some percentage of your portfolio.

Day trading has a specific definition in this context (can't remember if it's SEC, FINRA, or some other acronym), and refers to the buying and selling of the same security with a single day. That $2.5k Fidelity account will go out of its way to tell you that you're not allowed to do that.

You can trade with less. You can't day trade, defined based on the number of trades in a certain period. Some brokerages may enforce additional limits, but I've personally traded on NASDAQ via US brokerage accounts with less in them than that, so you certainly can do it.

The $25k minimum only applies to day-trading accounts. See sibling comments for details.

He'll just cut the stream<->robinhood connection, there's nothing from robinhood on down that will save his $25k.

Actually, there kind of is. It will stop you from placing trades if you daytrade with less than that. Your account will be suspended.

https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en-us/articles/217072366-Pa...

Stopping you from trading on the account doesn't protect the value in the account (and makes it harder for you to take action that would protect it, too!)

Typically you're forbidden from increasing your equity loan on a margin call - closes are completely fine (So you can buy shorts, or sell longs, but the inverse is against the rules). I've never used robinhood, but I've been declared a PDT before.

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