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Comment by kanobo | Hacker News Reader

I think it's great to lower the barrier of entry to financial services and such but one thing I feel is lacking is the education component. There's not enough explanation, warnings, and documentation in the UI or on their site because of the effort of getting people to invest as quickly as possible.

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Education is not only lacking, but as you point out in your second sentence, this is by design.

I haven't used Robinhood for quite some time now, but by far my biggest pet peeve (well, more than pet peeve, it was the reason I deleted the app and closed my account) is that graphs had no labeled y axis. A stock price graph with no labeled y axis, and no 0 value, is almost entirely useless. You may be able to tell if your stock went up or down, but not by how much.

But then that is the entire point of Robinhood. Robinhood is a gaming company much more than it is an online brokerage.

A while ago I got a cold call from a recruiter at robinhood. The key metric they used to sell me on how awesome they were was the number of times per day a typical user accessed the app. Straight up engagement metrics like a game.

smh

For anyone that hasn't used it, they literally have a discover tab for options with things like "I think it's staying the same" with the recommendation to create an iron condor and some possible positions you can open [0]. Although they may have changed it as my app only shows learn more now and does not directly show you positions you can open.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/9bw90v/robi...

> with the recommendation to create an iron condor

Have you tried? The interface is good if all you want to do is buy or sell a single option. If you try an iron condor, with 4 options, it's difficult to get a picture of what you are doing. Max profit, max loss, greeks for the combined options, etc.

Some other platforms allow you to setup an iron condor with a single click, then move strikes around and see the numbers change.

Heck, even the greeks for a single option are kinda hidden before you buy. Many people don't even know you can see them before buying. It is also difficult to compare greeks between different options.

Spreads in general are not very visible in RH(and are a 'higher level'). It should encourage people to use them more to minimize risk.

It's like 10 clicks to go from seeing the greeks for one option to seeing the greeks for another. You have to go all the way to the page where you're choosing how many contracts to buy/sell before you can click to see them.

It's really weird.

Without decent understanding of how options work, even iron condors can turn bad. You are writing options, so you're still running assignment risk or pin risk. It's mostly benign if you know what you are doing but can be a brutal lesson if you just clicked because you think "it's staying the same".

Watch out trading options when you don't know your max risk and allow a platform to calculate it for you [0].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/ai07ft/whats_...

Although it's India specific, Zerodha, a Robindhood-like zero brokerage service, has a fantastic app dedicated to finance education called "Varsity". One of the best examples of solid, well-presented content marketing I have seen.

Even for people who know what they are doing the UI is godawful. I've purchased wrong things because when I click something it changed from PUT to CALL. You have to be really careful because things don't seem to stick like you would expect when choosing an option.

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