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Comment by sgregnt | Hacker News Reader

It's not just Robinhood, I'm on Schwab and they blocked the GME stock from teading this morning (probably sell is till open)

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Schwab, TDA, and others restricted trading on margin. A company saying "we won't loan you money to speculate on this volatile stock" is way different than saying "we won't let you trade this stock with your money", IMO.

Trading 212 in the UK has disabled purchases of GME stock. Ironically Trading 212's tagline also includes "democratising" trading.

I think so too, but as someone not in any sort of GME position, but on TDA (which is being acquired by Schwab anyway), this is a good reason for me to accelerate my search to move off the platform to a more retail friendly brokerage.

I heard this about another brokerage, too... Maybe not such great news for that lawsuit?

Not sure about either way. One thing did look interesting to me: the messages when trying to buy/ short the stock on Schwab looked strange. This might be indicative that they did not have a suitable system in place to interfere with the trading so drastically?

Initially it would say the stock ticket is wrong then after trying a few minutes later I trying short selling it would say the margins are not met (however I had more than 1000% margins) and finally it said the trading is restricted because of high volatility.

That's pretty weird. It sounds like something that had to be improvised on their end.

It does seem like there was some outside intervention:

- Multiple brokerages making these types of decisions, not just one

- Brokerages appearing to improvise (i.e. looking strange, maybe not tested out much beforehand) technical ways to send this new message

- Brokerage messaging and decision-making policy appearing to be volatile by itself (!)

- Claims (nothing substantiated) that e.g. government heads were involved in making the call

These factors seem to add up, so it's interesting to watch this unfold.

It might help the defense but ultimately the percentage of GameStop’s stock that is traded/held on RobinHood is very high (it is most of the market) and restricting trades on the platform is likely to cause serious losses to their customers. All the ingredients of a securities fraud case are present and the company stands to lose its entire business over the lawsuit.

According to reddit there were issues and people couldn't buy for a while or on the first try but after waiting and multiple attempts were able to.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6wrig/you_...

Me too. Couldn’t make any trades, nor sell off my position as trading continued elsewhere and was dropping precipitously. I ended up selling off at $132 and lost 7k from a 10k investment just before the end of trading last night.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945839.

It looks like everything is still available on Fidelity.

I put up a small limit order on ETrade this morning for schnitzengiggles and it accepted it and then executed it.

I just tried on Schwab and it doesn’t look like I’m blocked.

M1 blocking now too.

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