But this is straight-up market manipulation. There's no justifiable reason to halt trading on GME except as a means of cooling the market long enough for Important People to exit their bleeding positions.
There's a big ass disclaimer that you sign saying that markets fluctuate and that Robinhood isn't liable for losses of capital.
It's only certain retail brokers, and, mystifyingly, mostly the ones who have hedge funds with significant ownership interests.
But the general case of “the market should never interfere with trading” isn’t true, but typically we only allow that at the exchange level.
What Robinhood has done is apparently to ALLOW trading, but only selling, not buying. At a time when a close partner of theirs is at significant risk if the stock price goes up.
Robinhood is stuck between a set of large lawsuits and a set of even bigger lawsuits. It seems like their internal counsel has decided halting trading will lead to the set containing the smaller lawsuits of the two.
You think they are legitimately scared of being successfully sued for "tricking people" into buying through gameification? That looks like CYA-BS from here. If that were a legitimate concern, why wasn't the interface de-gameified long ago?
If it was purely a halt on all trading I could see the logic, but only preventing people from buying seems fishy to me.
(I'm not involved one way or the other; I don't trade shares at all)
Buying exposes them to additional risk in the form of potential future lawsuits.
Which, lets be honest, would have more merit than a "I missed out potential gains" lawsuit.
> If a retail customer loses money and makes a FINRA complaint that Robinhood induced them to buy through its gameified interface, it is liable
This seems like an attempt to pass the buck to FINRA, and I'm fairly skeptical, but open to being convinced. Have there been FINRA complaints that resulted in substantive enforcement actions centered on a broker's gamified user interface?