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Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

" Their whole business is to encourage folks that should not be day trading to day trade"

Also using the ridiculously upside down moral convention that they are somehow 'the good guys defeating the system' i.e. 'Robin Hood'.

"We wanted to do something after occupy Wall Street, you know. Something real. So, how about, get all the young people to, you know, put their money into Wall Street" is basically their 'storyboard motivation'. Which the CNN interviewer accepted without a hint of skepticism.

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It's amazing how many times I've seen people post losses in excess of $20,000 on r/wallstreetbets.

The people in r/wallstreetbets usually understand that they're making stupid bets. OTOH, r/Robinhood is full of completely irresponsible traders -- trading in illiquid securities, dumping tons of money in penny stocks, triggering PDT restrictions and getting stuck with unwanted positions, not understanding bid/ask/mark (usually blaming RH or the "market maker" boogeyman for changing the price on them), buying OTM weekly options (known informally on wallstreetbets as "FD"s...), complaining about tons of "glitches" that are actually just them losing money through ignorance, and (one that has always confused me) blaming all losses on some mysterious "market maker" boogeyman who kills all of their trades.

If it was 1996, these people would be speculating on Beanie Baby portfolios hedged with Charizard cards.

Given the millennial user base, they probably were.

Eh, they're actually going for both millenials and younger. A lot of their advertising is in YouTube ads and YouTube podcasts, which is definitely aimed at a younger audience than millenials.

To be fair, RH does sometimes have problems. They blew up the other morning and screwed over a number of people by closing their accounts for the day while they tried to figure out how their system credited them with options sales at 10-100x actual value. RH has definitely got bugs, and if I were serious about playing the market I'd go with IB or TW, or just about anyone else.

That number of people is quite large. Between FB groups, reddit and Twitter comments it definitely exceeds the hundreds.

I was locked out for 29 hours with expiring strangles that would have had significant upside if closed at the right time, lost everything put into them by the time I could get back in.

Never received communication about the lock out or being allowed back in.

They have no phone support and during that whole period not a single email was responded to.

To imagine this company as a bank is one of the most ridiculous concepts ive heard of.

It's one of my favorite subreddits for that reason. Though there are definitely some people that do seem to have a very legitimate gambling problem and I feel bad for them and their families.

There's one guy on there who lost nearly a million bucks. And another one who I believe has lost more than that, and hasn't posted a single thing in three months, since he finally made it all the way to bankrupt. Makes you think a little, I wonder if he's still alive.

I did learn that options are super exciting and a great way to lose every last penny. I got lucky and came out ever so slightly ahead on my run through WSB, but I got out of it and now I'm back to normal stocks even with my play money.

Yeah, the younger crowd doesn't trade, not because "the maaaan" is keeping them from it, but because it's a very complicated way of making money, and they typically don't want to learn how to do it right. What this startup is doing is telling the younger crowd that it's the former, while also saying "Look how easy this is!" and deliberately oversimplifying complex systems.

It's not a matter of complexity, it's a matter of power, or rather, information asymmetry.

Buying stocks isn't really investing, it's more akin to gambling like Poker, with all other investors at the table.

Many of those investors have massive computers, R&D firms, brilliant minds, 'inside information', and relationships with those companies and CEO's.

So what 'millenial' is going to trade better than those?

Zero. Or at least in the long run.

The only way to 'beat the man' is to have more knowledge than Wall St. and that is extremely rare.

So what 'Robin Hood' does is sign up fish to feed to sharks.

It might make sense to put a chunk of savings in a broad array of stocks (some in bonds, some in gold, some in cash etc.) - but 'trading' against Wall Street is about as smart as playing Poker against the best in the world thinking you're going to win.

The real appeal from the users I have heard is lack of gatekeeping and minimal tolls which I suppose makes it essentially a knife with just a thin hilt as a handle - technically you can save money using it responsibly but most people just hurt themselves.

I’m still up 12% (although down from 30%) in this bull market. The trick to buy an array of better companies and to not sell/trade them. Every trade you make gives the HFT MIT quants an opportunity to take money out of your pocket! Hold at least 1 year for the substantial tax advantage, 2 years for gains to materialize (Peter Lynch’s Advice), or indefinitely as Warren Buffet has advised.

Also don’t touch or put more than 3% in options or crypto. 80% of traders lose money with options and crypto doesn’t usually generate interest or dividends. Also crypto taxes were absolute difficult nightmare for me last year.

> The trick to buy an array of better companies

Congratulations, you just reinvented the S&P 500.

Lol, I can't figure out if that comment is satire or not.

Which is why buying into funds that track the S&P 500 and holding for a long time is a valid way to go...

HFTs don't make money off of retail investors. Can't front run your trade if it can be filled with 1 order. HFTs pray on institutional investors who need to buy or sell large amounts of stock.

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