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Comment by bobblywobbles | Hacker News Reader

I can't really read the whole article, but from what it sounds like is a man put too much into the stock market, and lost. He took out even more to pay his debts, and lost that too.

This has nothing to do with the app, but the risk tolerance of those involved.

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The worst cases of people losing their shirt tend to be people speculating with options, and it's definitely up to the broker what options trades (beyond those secured by cash or securities) they want to permit their customers to do.

There are different levels of options trading for a reason. Giving level 3 options trading out to anyone is reckless; in the hands of many people these are tools that are pretty much being used for making leveraged speculative bets, not careful hedges of risk.

The app makes it very easy (and promotes) leveraging beyond your means which encourages subcultures like /r/wallstreetbets and influences young professionals to dump irresponsible amounts of money into the app. Robinhood 100% knows about this and benefits from it, you can argue how complicit they are but there is no doubting that they are in fact complicit.

Any broker can give you margin, robinhood does all the same things TD ameritrade and everyone else does. A discussion about wall street bets is another thing, but robinhood is not some unique platform in this regard.

If your mitigation of Robinhood's culpability would apply just as straightforwardly to an actual casino, that's a damning statement about what Robinhood is.

But all of these trades are just as possible in etrade, TD Ameritrade, etc. In robinhood, your trades even have to be cash-secured so your downside is capped to your deposit amount. The futures account I have on TD Ameritrade is much riskier than RH...

The whole article is about the distinction.

And we, the Taxpayers, will most likely end up bailing this guy out.

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