/r/wsb, on the other hand, loves tail risk, long or short. That subreddit needs to be shutdown by the SEC. It's serving as an investment advisor for a significant number of young people, whether it masquerades as satire or not.
I think this would set a bad precedent. the "advice" on wsb is mostly terrible, but if a bunch of trolls posting loss porn can be construed as an "investment advisor", I'd hate to see what other sorts of irresponsible speech can be shut down. if I give you shitty legal advice, I might be "acting as a lawyer" in some sense, but I'm not actually a lawyer and I shouldn't be subject to the same liability as a real lawyer.
similar liability exists for other people who give advice in a professional capacity (eg, lawyers, doctors, engineers), but I can't think of any situation where a layperson would be held responsible for bad advice.
RH is taking the same advantage that Juul got – free marketing and a lot of young people abusing the product. Wondering if they'll get the same crackdown as well.
Do we? It's not like you have to be an accredited investor to buy and sell options.
For example, if Robinhood wants to gamify everything, then advanced trading opportunities should be part of some built-in experience-based level up system. E.g. you can't trade options until you have made X classic trades, or after you've completed X days of simulated advanced trading.
It already is a thing on all brokerages, including RH. If you go into your portfolio in the app, there are different option trading levels (which is standardized across the industry), and you can get upgraded to the next level as you do trades over time. You cannot just jump to level 3 as soon as you install the app. While I cannot comment on how their algorithms for upgrade eligibility work, it already exists in the same shape and form as on all other brokerage services.