Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store
play.google.com
play.google.com
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947697&p=2
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(and so on)
Edit: I don't think I'm following you.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.
E.g. see https://www.antitrustinstitute.org/work-product/antitrust-en...
Rather than proposing a new technological solution to the problem ("platforms to protocols") which may work but is unproven, we could simply restart the use of existing tools that have been proven to work. This has the advantage of being a strategy that can be explained to non-technical folks.
The "existing tools" have been proven to have a major weakness, namely they can be neutered by regulatory capture. Unless you can get everyone to magically forget how they circumvented the rules last time, you can't simply restart using them.
Not the definition of Anarchy I would use but I was understanding you had used anarchy == chaos
The process of doing that involves investigation, subpoenas, and warrants, and is subject to laws created in a more or less democratic process. No part of it requires anyone to prevent me from sending illegal emails, just an apparatus to punish me if I do.
I really hope that gambling on GME is not a "major part" of a significant number of people's lives.
TBH 'protocols not platforms' has become kind of a slogan lately, but history doesn't make it look too promising. Email is a protocol, but it has largely been dominated by Google.
A really compelling product can capture a protocol.
For me personally, even if we end up with large players offering the largest (presumably most product-focused) instances of various protocols (Gmail with email, imagine Tiwtter hosting the largest Mastodon instance, Discord providing Matrix hosting), the fact I have the freedom to federate and set up my own instance or pay a smaller provider that will respect my privacy, is still a much better situation than the current "platforms, no protocols".
In future use a domain you own as the email address and redirect to your email provider.
Maybe anecdotal every company in my experience is on Office 365. Most private people here have hotmail/outlook as they where first before gmail.
It's a major part of the mega wealthy's lives. They've profited in this pandemic and it's not because of the fundamentals. Shorts squeeze the market too much but they ( hedge funds) should be responsible adults and take their losses. Not force Robinhood to unethically force sell it's massive user base to liquidate b/c their system bit their biggest customer.
We're about to see whether the people actually have rights or if this is actually a class warfare situation. I suspect it's the latter.
It's absolutely the latter. GME is a meme stock that people will forget about in 3 months. If 2008 didn't cause anyone to go to jail (where millions lost their houses and retirements), manipulating a short squeeze on a failing company certainly won't.
"Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)"
Article subtitle:
> Altering the internet's economic and digital infrastructure to promote free speech
I am somewhat skeptical of crypto, but I do hope that the DeFi ecosystem, 20 years in the future, will act as a democratizing force for financial markets.
That seems like a terrifying point of failure to have, unless I'm misunderstanding how it works.
Perhaps a parallel here is: if the fiat markets are struggling, then small businesses may struggle and lack the business they need to sustain themselves due to economic fears and self-preservation, but that business can exist in some form without the market through free trade or other means of currency or agreements to provide products and services, not beholden to the mercy of a volatile, inaccessible digital system that the vast majority of people don't understand very well.
Disclaimer: I don't hold solana or ETH.
Other people are not like you. Most people have still never even heard of Etherium. Most people won't touch something like that without explicit approval from a government. Which, obviously, is somewhat contrary to the point.
I think the real long term (20+ years) winners in this space will gracefully marry the old world with the new, until society has gotten used to these concepts and we can slowly deprecate some of the centralization.
This statement was true in 2016, 2018 and 2021. The difference being the momentum - a LOT more people have heard of Ethereum now than back then. I think you might be underestimating the network effect that Ethereum has in the space. All the tooling, beginner-friendly tutorials/books/blogs, institutions and funds flowing into the projects, the sheer number of people working on projects is super impressive.
For anything else to catch up with Ethereum, it's going to take a lot more than "being better technologically". Ethereum currently does have major scaling issues but the community is converging on the "rollups" Layer-2 solutions [1] as a temporary option until it gets added into Eth2. So I suspect the next few months will be a little rough but things like Matic.network or Optimism will start maturing.
[1] https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r...
So, yeah, sticking by that statement.
I just think it's similar to some of the earlier internet days like shopping online or sending emails - in its early days most people did not know much about these concepts except for the tech community and early adopters.
Otherwise, it's just an argument that risk exists, which is obvious and uninteresting.
Does it count as a slippery slope fallacy if the government argues that not stopping encrypted communications will result in terrorists killing your grandma? Because I heard that one a lot when Bush was president and they haven't really ever stopped using it. Is there a better fallacy for that example?
The main one though is assuming the parties cant adjust course part way though. "If we turn this ship this way we will crash into that island in two days!"
Extropolation is different as it takes into a account changes in behaviour and real world constraints
So an opposition that relies on "what if" scenarios to oppose progressive change is often one which is either unaware-of or has explicitly looked at other nations that are 10-50 years ahead on whatever the policy is, and discovered that enacting step X did not, in fact, lead to a downward spiral into nightmare scenario Y.
Bah! You're only saying that because induction worked the last n times ;)
If I say it's a slippery slope from A to B, what that's supposed to mean is that A being true will increase the risk of B becoming true if other things happen as well.
How it's often used though is that if A is a slippery slope to B then A is equivalent to B, and thus any issue with B is an unavoidable issue for A. And of course it gets worse when people jump from A to Z.
Like... if an event has an 80% chance of occurring as a result of an action, it seems that the event is highly likely to occur. If this has an 80% chance causing of a different event, which has an 80% chance of a different event, leading to an 80% chance of a different event, the probability of the final event from a point in time before the first event occurred would be 41%.
Arguments are a construction of information intended to induce an understanding of probability among others, and skipping steps along the way weakens trust in that conclusion.
Otherwise we'd be fine with the concept of e.g. trying methamphetamine just a few times and then planning to stop.
> Logic and critical thinking textbooks typically discuss slippery slope arguments as a form of fallacy but usually acknowledge that "slippery slope arguments can be good ones if the slope is real—that is, if there is good evidence that the consequences of the initial action are highly likely to occur. The strength of the argument depends on two factors. The first is the strength of each link in the causal chain; the argument cannot be stronger than its weakest link. The second is the number of links; the more links there are, the more likely it is that other factors could alter the consequences."
Maybe we could amend the law. Seriously.
Lots of people love to dump on the constitution as old and not relevant. But it’s meant to restrict government and protect people’s freedom.
So is it morally allowable to discuss <abhorrent topic> online? Should it be law to allow or disallow <abhorrent topic>?
Who decides what the majority of people consider to be abhorrent?
There is a simple solution to this if you don't like the way they behave: stop using their product, and recommend others do the same.
Of course, your not using it doesn't prevent others from using it if they want to, but that's freedom of choice for you.
social media posts can be a single person communicating with millions.
the damage per unit of effort is much much lower for the unmoderated phone vs the unmoderated social
Right now you have the right to associate or disassociate with whomever you like (protected classes aside). In your altered future, the government forces churches to allow atheists and rival religions to be allowed to speak at the church, despite the desires of the owners and congregation. It would effectively be compelled association.
Trouble is when government gives out monopolies, or supporting monopolies they like.
Government currently closed side.
Government has chosen atheism as its religion. Very hostile toward other religions. Everyone pays for government school, but want to a Christian education, then you have to pay twice.
You're gonna want to provide proof of that claim.
Government schools aren’t atheist - they are secular. They simply aren’t allowed to teach Christianity because Jews and Muslims would have the same “I have to pay twice” complaint you mentioned. Also, what you say about Christian education is factually wrong. There are plenty of places in the USA where you can find a Christian Charter school or use school vouchers.
Subtle difference, as required by the topic.
I'm not a stamp collector. Does that mean I lack a stamp collection, or do I have a collection of a lack of stamps?
If I am asymptomatic, is there a lack of symptoms, or is my symptom the lack thereof?
It's one thing to not believe in unicorns, it's another to define yourself in opposition to unicorn believers, which many atheists do.
Adding 'types' in front of the word just continues us down the path of words not really meaning anything anymore.
Are radical atheists just atheists that act like dicks about it? Don't call them radical atheists, just call them dicks. Is a New Atheist one that does interpretive dance to explain their belief that there is no god? That's just an unlikely combination of two things, one of which is atheism.
Eg. I'm a radical grammarian (a dick when it comes to grammar).
I do not go and seek out others who believe in the lack of a diety to associate and grow together.
I don't go on to claim wars over the land holy to my belief of no diety.
I don't go on to terrorize my children and tell them they are unloved because they're born in a way that offends my belief in the lack of a diety.
I don't go on to terrorize my neighbors and tell them they are unloved because they offend my belief in the lack of a diety.
I don't go to other people who have different beliefs and tell them they are wrong due to their belief in a diety. And that my belief is the only way they can be saved.
Atheism is NOT a religion, it is not a system of beliefs in any meaningfully comparable way. You can rearrange words all you want, but the difference in result (not word choice) is anything but subtle.
My intention is not to paint with a wide brush, just to demonstrate that everyone has beliefs, and they manifest in different ways.
>>>>I don't go to a building and dance and sing to my belief of no diety. ( I believe seculars call it a rave.)
>>>>>>I do not go and seek out others who believe in the lack of a diety to associate and grow together. (any number of activities can fall in this category in fact)
>>>>>>I don't go on to claim wars over the land holy to my belief of no diety. (I believe are referring to Bush/Obama nation-building)
>>>>>> I don't go on to terrorize my children and tell them they are unloved because they're born in a way that offends my belief in the lack of a diety. (I believe you are referring to the secular terrorism, that is human-to-human, i.e. calling others "Deplorables" )
>>>>>I don't go on to terrorize my neighbors and tell them they are unloved because they offend my belief in the lack of a diety. (see above)
>>>>>I don't go to other people who have different beliefs and tell them they are wrong due to their belief in a diety. And that my belief is the only way they can be saved. (I believe there is no need to say X is wrong when instead they resort to shut them up #cancelculture)
Atheism is not a religion, but it is a belief system like any other. It may appeal to logical people, but that doesn't make it better or worse. Its just a different way to perceive the world around you.
No more implication than that. It is, however, actively a belief. It's not "I don't care" or "it's different to the one you believe in", or "I don't believe there is a god", it is "I believe there is no god"
Never said atheism was a religion, would never say that because it's objectively false.
Work with your government to have you taxes assigned to the Christian school. Here in Ontario Canada when you file your taxes you select if your child is attending catholic school and the catholic school board gets revenue equal to the number of people attending.
All the cash in my wallet says otherwise.
Having a correct and accurate understanding of that carries a whole host of implications with it, e.g., it makes the tech companies' censorious autocratic behavior a violation of the natural God given human rights that the government is as prohibited from abridging as much as the tech companies that fall under it's jurisdiction.
What we are facing, just to continue the example to further illustrate the point, is the tech companies are violating human rights through their censorious ways and they are violating the Constitution, the highest law of the land. If the USA were still a functional and healthy society any court would issue an immediate order to require all tech companies to not violate the human rights that the Constitution prohibits any inferior jurisdiction (everything falling under the Constitution, i,e., everything) from violating. The US Code even provides penalties for the violation of the Constitutional laws that the Government and the tech companies are persistently and even maliciously violating on a regular basis.
It is rather clear that the far larger problem is the breakdown of fundamental rule of law (mutually agreed upon parameters for peace) and the replacement and encroachment of ever more rule of power (I will do whatever I want because I have the ability to make you). It will not end well one way or another if it is not fixed soon, and it does not look like those with the lust of power in their eyes have any intention of giving up anything.
Its a backdoor way around the constitutional restrictions. AKA the government can't restrict free speech or search your house everyday, but its going to allow everyone else to restrict and search your house for the same effect. Given the close ties between the leaders & .001%, the result is the same. It won't matter to you when you get charged with a crime you didn't commit whether the government was tracking your phone or the phone company reports your phone to the government. The result is the same.
Because where I live the government via corporations is scraping up "metadata" which includes people's web cams feeds, phone records, etc. AKA searching their house. And if you haven't been paying attention, as despicable as the speech is, political "speech" is being suppressed by large tech and media companies, and to a lesser extent what people actually say in public spaces, be that the library or the workplace.
There is a reason Us corporations can’t disclose electronic search warrants to their owners, or why no one kicked Trump off their platform despite incessant rule violations until he was days from leaving, it’s called raw political power.
And when has ever had a legal right to political speech at their workplace? Unless you have an employment contract which explicitly guarantees (such as teacher tenure) your employer can fire you for tons of reasons. Some states have labor laws that require “for cause”, but if you are talking politics at a workplace where that is not the core business, it’s not hard for an employer to argue your discussion adversely affects business.
I mean your basically arguing my point.
And those rights are only to protect you from government actions because it’s the ultimate monopoly.
The first amendment does not give you the right to enter someone else’s house to spread your political opinions, just as the second doesn’t give you the right to walk in to their home with your loaded guns.
And stop trying to redefine the word monopoly. The internet is completely free and anyone can post whatever they want on their own web site.
Otherwise, it is not in fact free. Registrars can take your domain (look what is happening to eu domains owned by UK folx) and web hosts, are in part responsible for the content they host and can refuse to continue to do business with you.
Hell, even if you roll your own setup, the ISP you use can still choose not to do business with you, leaving your entire setup offline.
As I see it, the core issue is that with enough substitutes denying business to a person/organization, the customer can effectively be denied access to “the town square”.
In the relevant case law, the “town square” is only applied when there was only a single meeting space in the town. In that case, it was a private mall. Twitter doesn’t apply as a town square on the internet because there are plenty other places to communicate on the internet, even if it is not as convenient or wide reaching. The problem lies in the case where all substitutes for a town square all block you.
The solution historically was to insist on a common carrier designation for certain utilities.
Do you not see how that's contradictory?
And what would it even look like? Would Hacker News no longer be allowed to have moderators?
Your 'single person' straw man aside, I don't think the conduits of conversation are the right place to attack this problem. It's just far too risky to have utterly unaccountable businesses be in the business of policing what people say.
I have the radical opinion that the police should be doing the policing. If people are criming online (threats of violence, planning to overthrow the government), they should get a visit from The Law.
Everything about what twitter did was stupid. They let him talk for years, and then finally stopped him at the worst time. They cancelled him when there was little more damage he could do and ruined ideas of free speech neutrality and it allowed his ilk to claim censorship and it helped with making him a martyr. Just absolute stupidity.
Letting corporations deal with dangerous thought leaders is not a solution that has even the slimmest chance of working.
Bundling together lots of individual garbage theories into giant piles doesn’t net you anything other than garbage theories, just like bundling bad mortgage securities didn’t mitigate risk in the subprime crisis.
Instead of saying ‘lots of statistical algorithms,’ name one, or even two, that stand up to genuine scrutiny (and that aren’t the readily debunked Charles J. Cicchetti claims.) Don’t hide behind the sheer number of crackpot theories. Or, you know, admit you have nothing but a hunch based on cognitive dissonance.
“The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud.” Based on the study, the group concluded that the machines should not be used in Michigan nor should the election results in Antrim County be certified.
In this county, the vote was actually corrected. And knowing these machines were capable of 70% error rates should have triggered a full statewide forensic audit in Michigan at the least.
Heres the surveillance footage of 30K suitcase ballots with absolutely no chain of custody after the entire building was shut down and all poll watchers kicked out on the basis of a bullshit water pipe leak story, being counted between 11pm and 1am the night of the election: https://rumble.com/vblh33-attorney-jackie-pick-exposes-georg...
At any rate, it's not a hunch. It's a fact. The election was stolen. We live in a banana republic.
1. The Antirim report was conducted by Russell James Ramsland who is the exact same non-expert person who mixed up Minnesota and Michigan. So, yes it does have something to do with it.
2. The report was not ordered by a judge, it was permitted. The distinction matters, because suggesting the judge 'ordered it' implies that it was some sort of impartial inquiry, instead of just another hack job by someone who wanted Trump to win.
3. The surveillance footage and the water pipe events happened on different nights, 17 hours apart.
That's just purely on the basis of facts that even aren't up for argument. There's much more to disagree with when further analyzing your claims, and while I'd be happy to go over them, I don't feel like a deep comment on an old news story is the best place for me to spend my time.
That your three main points contain full on factual misstatements should give you enough pause to reconsider the certainty of your conclusion.
also explain why no court, no intelligence agency (local or international), and the vast majority of the US Senate (consisting of both major political parties) disagrees with your assessment.
Also if the presidential votes are invalid than I guess we need to assume all the other items on the ballet (house, senate, bills, etc) were also invalid correct?
If the left is this good at such a grand conspiracy, then they really should run the country.
We don't have the federal courts, not in the least. It's just fraud. The FBI would rather investigate Twitter shitposters than touch this. They'd rather get jobs at CNN as consultants to pitch their own actual conspiracy theory about Trump being a Russian stooge for three years despite having had exculpatory evidence the entire time. I don't know how Americans are so naive when it comes to the depravity of our system.
It’s weird how almost every post you’ve done has been filled with factually wrong data, eg, the federal courts. But it helps explain why on less factual matters your bias so is severe. The sad part is I think you have no idea about your bias and actually believe what you’re writing.
In general social psychology have to be factored in as well. Anecdotally speaking, shutting down outdoor dining pushed more people to party at home.
Non-n95 masks / etc don't filter much when breathing in. We wear masks to protect others...
We need to put more people at risk, because we can't meet some nebulous, ever-shifting standard that asks us to trade human lives for dollars of economic activity. Nobody wants to pin down exactly how many dollars they think a human life is worth, though.
On the one hand, we've got every special interest group under the sun loudly shouting that their business is special, and must be allowed to operate as if nothing has changed over the past year.
On the other hand, we've got public health - a communal good, that everyone is responsible for, but nobody gets held responsible for.
Unfortunately what and how things were closed seemed haphazard and not entirely justified or communicated effectively.
There should have been more contact tracing and a focus to close only areas prone to spreading Covid-19.
It is possible.
It is possible to make money buying lottery tickets too.
The best way to make money is to work for it. Yet because of a demand for profit and return on investment working people are getting squeezed with low wages and bad conditions.
Outrage at a invest platform doing some thing or another - I do not care about that. My outrage is at low wages and bad conditions for ordinary working people
I don’t have much hope for this, mainly because being the owner of a platform is much more profitable than being one of many protocol end points. Look at git. It is hard to think of a more open protocol, and yet GitHub absolutely dominates and it is a big deal if they decide to cut off your repo.
A better alternative is for government to fund and operate critical infrastructure or at least heavily regulate it.
I don’t have to worry that I will get deplatformed from mail, because the USPS is there and they have strict legal requirements prohibiting them from deplatforming people. I don’t have to worry that I won’t be deplatformed from roads, because most roads are operated by the government, which is under strict legal precedents that they can’t deplatform me. It is similar with utilities such as electricity, water, gas which are privately operated but heavily regulated.
Some of the internet infrastructure is both becoming more vital as has economies of scale such that there is an inherent drive for consolidation. As such, I think it is becoming time that such things be regulated like utilities.
None of the things you mention are platforms.
Mail is not a platform. Roads are not a platform. Electricity, water and gas are not platforms.
These are all examples of point to point connection. None of them allow you to reach millions of people unfederated.
If you start sending out illegal hate mail to millions of people, you bet you'll be "deplatformed" by the USPS. They will cut off your account and probably press charges.
If you start sending out legal harassment mail to millions of people, you'll get a discount.
What I do care about is moving to protocols and data portability. I want the ability to switch to another provider if I’m not happy with their decisions. I absolutely don’t like my data being held hostage.
I also hope this realization extends to things like GMail which hasn’t yet seen a similar scrutiny
The financial trading app Robinhood is been hit with a federal class action lawsuit after it restricted trades to stocks popular on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets, sending Redditors and app users into a meltdown.
The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York on Thursday, alleges that the app “purposefully, willfully, and knowingly removing the stock ‘GME’ from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock rise, thereby deprived [sic] retail investors of the ability to invest in the open-market and manipulating the open-market.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/robinhood-hit-with-class-actio...
Tune will change when RSUs and 401ks get effected.
Cellphone lockdowns are the keystone here.
There are sensible arguments for cellphones being walled gardens (grandmas can't defend their phone against malware, etc), but this is the devil's bargain you have to accept.
As long as people (a) want everything on their cellphone and (b) want it to be locked-down enough that they can trust it to not listen in on them and stalk their location, everything downstream of the cellphone will be intermediated.
It would be nice if it was easier to enter/exit the garden at will, sure, but thats not the same thing.
I'm technically competent but these systems are so complex i don't think i could defend against malware in a complete open system. Actually, they're so complex that i do not think its possible to completely defend against malware as an end user without serious changes to behavior that is undesirable to most (eg. stop download apps so freely)
Unfortunately, many people (sadly including the far left, who 10 years ago I would have called myself part of) & the media are actively celebrating these blocks and shutdowns because it serves their ideology. For now.
Luckily yes. Online access would be hindered, but nearly all my financial resources are handled through a local credit union.
I'm not in fear of the government seizing my assets, but I don't trust Google not to lock me out due to an algorithm run amok, or Tmobile giving my number away due to simple social engineering (that actually happened).
Apple I trust.
A strong digital rights for users is a good start, but I think the end goal is that they(the tech monopolies) are essential utilities for a majority of the world and should be regulated as such. A CEO should not be able to silence a democratically elected leader from a communications platform(congress or a govt. communications committee should decide), users should be able to buy the stock of their choosing(the SEC can decide to halt trading pending illegal behavior) and not have that right removed by a companies CEO.
I hope so too and I hope that movement will develop and adopt technological solutions and not advocate for government force. This is an opportunity for people to control their means of communication and create a more robust internet that can better withstand censorship attempts in the future. I fear it will instead be taken advantage of by people who want to increase government control perhaps to prevent competition with the currently dominant actors on the market. Any further normalization of government control of communication or the internet must be resisted if we are to have any chance to keep the truly wonderful thing that the internet is today, despite all its imperfections.
> Robinhood, Parler, Twitter, Reddit (et cetera)
but represent trivial ephemera whose significance for the individual, following abandonment/deletion, vanishes into hindsight once the endowment effect and separation anxiety wears off.
I know that exists in pieces and small projects but it's not like more than a few dozen people in any town even can fathom what that is or why it's a good idea.
Google and Apple would never do this but imagine if every smartphone came not only with built in mesh-wifi ability but was on by default so it all acted as a repeater, you could probably communicate across entire states and countries given enough seconds like store-and-forward and ham radio-like solutions.
That feels like a huge violation of their stated intent though.
Is that how we're determining efficacy now...? Semantics?
I take it that you like FINRA because of the R in the name.
In actual fact, they use the term "enforcement action." Here's their report from 2020. See for yourself:
https://www.sec.gov/files/enforcement-annual-report-2020.pdf
No one serious thinks Gamestop stock is worth $400+. Robinhood cut off buying at the point when unsophisticated investors were caught up in a stampede to "stick it to the man." Seems like they did the right thing.
No. This is against the Free Market hypothesis. We are supposed to let the Dumb Money get into the market, fail out and learn their lesson.
Absolute nonsense. The exchange is protecting the trader from himself!!
The exchange is designed to make money selling and buying. There is no reason they would stop either unless some big wig made a phone call.
Over many stocks and long periods of time, this works quite well. However the system breaks down if everyone is trying to buy the same heavily manipulated stock.
Selling a stock short is NOT illegal. It is a perfectly valid type of investment according to the SEC:
“D. Are short sales legal? Although the vast majority of short sales are legal, abusive short sale practices are illegal. For example, it is prohibited for any person to engage in a series of transactions in order to create actual or apparent active trading in a security or to depress the price of a security for the purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of the security by others. Thus, short sales effected to manipulate the price of a stock are prohibited.”
Basically – you can’t short sell a stock to manipulate the price down so you can buy a lot more of it later. If you believe a stock is overpriced and short sell it, that is legal. That is exactly what tons of retail traders and hedge funds do every day, including on Gamestop.
On the other hand, manipulating a stock price upwards to cause a short squeeze IS illegal according to the same SEC article:
“Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal.”
Unprecedented numbers of people on Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere collaborated to intentionally create a short squeeze on GME in the last week. No one talked about a fundamental case why Gamestop the company was worth a lot of money and would be successful in the future; instead everyone made the argument that due to a very high short interest of 100%+, that a short squeeze would send the price “to the moon”. That is illegal according to the SEC.
Multiple brokerages, especially Robinhood, probably had their attorneys tell them that “Hey, you are aiding and abetting illegal activity by enabling a short squeeze and could be liable criminally or civilly if you continue to allow this blatant illegal activity on your platform”. So they decided to stop it by only allowing people to close their positions rather than open new ones in support of the short squeeze.
Another strong reason is that if the short squeeze caused the GME stock to go to 5000 in a sudden leap, tons of traders (both retail and professional) could instantly go broke, and then the brokerage (Robinhood) would be left holding the bag. For example, picture a retail investor with a Robinhood account had sold call options in the amount of $100,000 and their account was worth $200,000. If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000. Now multiply that by thousands of accounts…. no brokerage wants to take the risk of being bankrupted, so they shut it down.
The two strong reasons Robinhood and other brokers stopped trading was to prevent legal liability from enabling illegal activity on their platform, and for wanting to avoid potentially massive banktuptcy from traders unable to cover their losses.
0- https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l594yg/gme_...
Nothing different than Jim Cramer talking up a stock on CNBC every fucking night.
Edit: I know this because I watched a youtube video from a popular redditor named deepfuckingvalue a few weeks ago and bought into the thesis fully as a value investment. He goes under the name RoaringKitty on youtube.
I lost multiple years worth of salary this morning when RobinHood decided to stop selling GME.
You also quoted the SEC saying that manipulating a stock price to cause a short squeeze is illegal but also that short squeezes occur naturally. Expecting a short squeeze and intending to profit off of it is not illegal.
You make the point that some people on wallstreetbets made comments that crossed the line on manipulation. I'm sure that's true, but if you see a few problematic comments out of millions it's obviously absurd to say that a stock mustn't be bought because of them.
Ironically, you are criticizing what is clearly not manipulation (valuing GME highly and expecting to profit off of a coming short squeeze) in order to defend what clearly is manipulation (banning a million retail investors from taking one side of a trade at a critical moment).
Buying $300 worth of stock and then posting a rocket emoji on a message board: an assault on the basic foundations of capitalism.
That argument was made last year and early this year. The argument this week has been that the stock price will increase specifically because of a short squeeze, and the popular comment on WSB has been that buying and/or holding GME stock is a rebellious act that will cause that short squeeze to happen.
If deliberately causing a short squeeze constitutes illegal market manipulation, then at least some of the WSB comments advocate for going over that line. On the other hand, the SEC would probably have its hands full linking these comments to actual trades that were meaningful enough to move the stock price -- SEC rules aren't written with a horde of enraged small-dollar investors in mind as the culprits.
Notice that RoaringKitty has taken profits from his GME holdings over the past few weeks, most recently about two days ago, and has not continued buying into the stock.
> I lost multiple years worth of salary this morning when RobinHood decided to stop selling GME.
With all due respect, GME has been a highly speculative play for at least this entire week. It's not a good idea to speculate with money that you can't afford to lose.
I don't really think the market should allow for this sort of thing. I agree with you there. But that's how the rules are written, and now when the little guy figures out the rules they shut it down.
GME is trading at between 4x and 8x it's all time high in 2008. The graph of the stock price basically looks like a flat line until a few days ago where it dramatically spiked to far, far more than it's previous peak.
Are you saying that GME will actually be worth it's current stock price a year from now? Why is that?
Also robinhood doesn't allow selling naked options so that entire point of yours is moot.
If you buy or sell stocks with the intent to manipulate the price (either through a pump and dump scheme, or a short squeeze scheme) that is illegal. It doesn't matter whether the action is only buying or only selling. It is the intent.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l594yg/gme_...
If I think the price is going up and buy, that's legal. If I manipulate the price to go up after I buy, that's illegal. It's the same thing.
That's why every brokerage has a risk department. If you're a brokerage and you let thousands of customers write uncovered GME calls, you deserve to lose all your money and go out of business. Simple as that.
What if the price of a stock went from $300 to $5000 for legitimate reasons, perhaps due to some technological breakthrough. The exact same situation would happen. Would shutting down trading also be justified?
Reminds me of the scene in the The Big Short where the hot chick in the pool who currently works for the SEC (at the time) is in town in Vegas for a conference hoping to run into some Wall Street banker dudes so she can schmooze and float her resume to them. And it's not a conflict of interest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947674
From the number of Playstore votes it seems quite a few?
Will be interesting to see if it stays that way. Or if they can somehow cheat their way out of it and get all recent ratings deleted or something.
Any guesses?
[edit]
though there are some reports that the stocks were bought on margin, which makes it more(?) okay, I guess?
https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHS%20Custo...
4. Liquidation. In the event of the death of the Customer, or in the event the margin in any account in which the Customer has an interest shall in either Robinhood’s or the Introducing Broker’s discretion become unsatisfactory to either Robinhood or the Introducing Broker, or be deemed insufficient by either Robinhood or the Introducing Broker, Robinhood is hereby authorized; (a) to sell any or all securities or other property which Robinhood may hold for the Customer (either individually or jointly with others); (b) to buy any or all securities and other property which may be short in such accounts; and/or (c) to cancel any open orders and to close any or all outstanding contracts; all without demand for margin or additional margin, notice of sale or purchase, or other notice or advertisement, and that any prior demand or notice shall not be a waiver of its rights provided herein.
(emphasis added, and if you like that there's an arbitration agreement too.)
https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHS%20Margi...
WE CAN SELL YOUR SECURITIES OR OTHER ASSETS WITHOUT CONTACTING YOU. Some investors mistakenly believe that their brokerage firm must contact them for a margin call to be valid, and that their firm cannot liquidate securities or other assets in their accounts to meet the call unless the firm has contacted them first. This is not the case. Although we may attempt to notify you of margin calls, we are not required to do so. However, even if we have contacted you and provided a specific date to meet a margin call, we can still take necessary steps to protect our financial interests, including immediately selling the securities without notice to you. We may forcibly liquidate all or part of your account without prior notice, regardless of your intent to satisfy a margin call, in order to protect your interests or our interests.
YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO CHOOSE WHICH SECURITIES OR OTHER ASSETS IN YOUR ACCOUNT(S) ARE LIQUIDATED OR SOLD TO MEET A MARGIN CALL. Because the securities are collateral for the margin loan, we have the right to decide which security to sell in order to protect our interests.
WE CAN INCREASE “HOUSE” MAINTENANCE MARGIN REQUIREMENTS AT ANY TIME AND ARE NOT REQUIRED TO PROVIDE YOU ADVANCE WRITTEN NOTICE. These changes in policy often take effect immediately and may result in the issuance of a maintenance margin call. Your failure to satisfy the call may require us to liquidate or sell securities in your account(s).
So Robinhood technically is allowed to do this as per the letter of the law, and now the question is whether Robinhood is violating any fiduciary duties they have to their customers.
They are literally using the margin call mechanic to force closures in positions that have no risk.
The problem is that Robinhood is selling positions that are fully covered by their clients as well as prohibiting the buying of shares even when the purchase is 100% covered by the user.
I've been in this industry for 15 years now, including obviously the great recession, the flash crash, brexit, and a host of highly volatile events resulting in massive market swings and this is absolutely unheard of. I've never seen a broker prevent its clients from buying shares or liquidating shares that are fully accounted for and pose no risk to the broker.
"Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal." - https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/regsho.htm
I wouldn't be surprised if Robinhood and other brokers' compliance teams made the decision that the penalty for shutting down trading was less than the potential fallout for enabling illegal market manipulation behavior. Just because it's coordinated online between individuals doesn't mean that it's not illegal market manipulation.
> When you sign up for a new account, you’ll automatically start with a Robinhood Instant account, which is a margin account. This means you’ll have access to instant deposits and extended-hours trading. You also won’t have to wait for your funds to process when you sell stocks or make a deposit (up to $1,000).
I stand by my claim that margin accounts necessarily require forced liquidation, but this is pretty indefensible.
-----
If the stocks were bought on margin it's entirely non-objectionable. Forced liquidation is a well-known practice that's fundamental to margin accounts as a concept - without it, a margin account is just an unsecured loan, and nobody's going to offer the average margin trader a low-cost unsecured loan for stock speculation.
2. Long positions (buying and holding stock) aren't leveraged. There is no capital risk to holding a stock. If the sales of GME are entirely based on other positions being underwater, then sure, but it seems at least some of the examples provided aren't in that situation.
A broker can change margin maintenance requirements at any time, including for shares bought with margin. When using margin, a broker has wide latitude to liquidate positions of the account using margin.
Robinhood let’s you borrow money to buy stocks. If you borrow $10k to buy GME at $300 and it dropped to $100. There’s a risk to RH that you won’t be able to payback the loan. RH most likely will liquidate the position before it even hits $100 to mitigate the risk on the loan depending how leveraged you are.
Seems to be a coordinated move among all retail browsers (including IB according to people on this discussion - despite publicly claiming they are just hiking margins).
Basically, as of this morning, retail clients could only sell, whereas institutional clients could buy and sell as they wish.
Doesn’t sound remotely ok. In fact, sounds completely entirely not ok, and likely illegal (but I am not a lawyer)
This is just a conspiracy theory. It doesn't even make sense. If GME was objectively such a good bet, you really think that those institutional investors out there were simply ignoring it? That Robinhood's users alone were the sole reason for the speculative spike in this stock?
This is a SCAM. Robinhood users were the VICTIMS. And I won't speak to their motives, and am no real fan, but the truth is Robinhood saved you people a ton of money by refusing those trades.
What I’m saying is that you are provably wrong.
The stock market has a long reputation of saying "Well, sucks to be you" when various scams are committed - even when a hedge fund manager burns through a bunch of retirement funds and then shows up at the company demanding their annual retainer so I am quite reluctant to buy that this one instance is when altruism is coming in to play.
A bunch of people are choosing to loose a bit of their money in exchange for warm fuzzy feelings - I think it's absolutely idiotic but then again I don't tend to patronize casinos either. If there is someone behind this running a pump & dump scam they absolutely should be prosecuted as normal, but falling victim to a financial scam on the stock market is one of those properties capitalist libertarians always hold up and they can't change their mind just because this one instance ended up screwing them over instead.
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/google-remov...
Why should Google protect them against consequences of their own decisions?
I don't see how anyone could trust Robinhood with their money in the future.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
Citadel is a major source of funding for Robinhood. Citadel owns Melvin Capital Management. Melvin Capital Management is on the hook for billions in losses for their GameStop shorts.
How can it be more clear than this? People should be warned away Robinhood after this. Robinhood & Citadel should both be sued for manipulation of securities.
If anything it’s amazing that it took this long for anyone to notice.
Actually, given that RH is currently only allowing people to sell their positions, and not buy into them, the only correct step is for the app stores to only allow RH to be uninstalled, and to block any new installations. All for the financial well-being of their users, of course.
An app claiming to be a stock trading app that doesn't allow trades for a NASDAQ listed stock isn't really a stock trading app.
But the opinions of incensed humans aren't worth the rollback it takes to "correct" the problem.
The entirety of google is a money making machine intelligence serving it's few wealthy owners, and absolutely disrupting and destroying everything else.
We need to take the torch to our big tech overlords.
https://mobile.twitter.com/motherboard/status/13547982444553...
Sure let r/WallStreetBets and Wall Street battle it out. But I don't think that you are accounting for the ordinary people who would read about an amazing way to get rich quick in the news and decide to buy in. That's when the real bubble starts.
Whether you liked Parler or not, the lynching of Parler was ultimately a loss for everyone for the precedent that it set.
Parler
(deplatforming, service)
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Discord
(deplatforming, WSB)
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Robin Hood
(functional ban, WSB)
The GME/etc ban is a response from Robinhood so that they are not blamed for what theirs users (retail inverstors) do (controversial trading activities/losing money).
It's pretty blatant market manipulation.
This is the natural evolution when censorship as we've recently seen is given a pass.
Does anyone know the law well enough to know if this is indeed a violation of any statutes?
There are several glaring problems with the theory that Citadel is pushing for Robinhood to ban buying GME for financial motives:
1. Robinhood has NO relationship with Citadel LLC
2. Everybody knows about the theoretical conflict of interest between Citadel/Citadel Securities so it is incredibly unlikely that Citadel Securities would risk doing anything to help Citadel in such a high profile scenario (i.e. the SEC/FINRA would be able to find out this kind of thing very quickly and very easily)
3. Citadel has no financial motive to stop trading of GME, because Melvin Capital has no financial motive to stop trading of GME
4. If it was as simple as trying to profit off of GME going down, why would they bother halting trades on other securities (AMC, BB, NOK, BBBY, etc.)?
This article does a really good job at explaining the situation (much better than I can do) [6]
[1] https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHF%20SEC%2...
[2] https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20170203/NEWS01/1702...
[3] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/chinesewall.asp
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/citadel-point72-to-invest-2-75-...
[5] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gamestop-melvin-idUSKBN29...
[6] https://finance.yahoo.com/video/heres-why-robinhood-restrict...
Melvin Capital also said a day earlier that they do not give out comments on their positions and trading.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-melvin-fund-evotec-de-idU...
Since the claim that they closed their position in itself would potentially influence the market to their benefit, I don't see a reason to trust their statement.
The big guys know all this, only they were hoping to short, make a profit, and then reinvest down the road when things picked back up, making even more money. WSB just capitalized on their strategy and now that they are losing, they are throwing a fit.
I expect that a lot of RH users are going to do some research and discover that there are alternatives that are just as good, or even better.
You can also complain about Twitter or give its app a low rating or just stop using it.
Is that in it's terms of service?
FWIW, this is an app in a supposedly regulated sector, making the call to affect stock prices and cut retail investors out of the market and causing a stock to tank.
I think what's ACTUALLY going on (whether your cognitive dissonance will allow you to perceive this comment or not), is that since this doesn't cut across political lines, you want to treat the situation differently.
Calls to violence from people in power are different from market manipulation.
One sided halting in a moment like this reeks of market manipulation, which is illegal.
It looks many Chinese have learned their lessons from their own painful history, yet Americans didn't even care about history at all.
Those customers who have left Robinhood will never come back and it will take years to recover, if ever.
For anyone actually affected by Robinhood, I think leaving 1-star rating it is absolutely just.
However, mobbing, to me, is when the random internet gets out its pitchforks and finds something to dogpile on, even though they might not have been affected personally.
It's unrealistic to imply that people shouldn't share opinions of behavior if they weren't directly and personally affected by that behavior. You're also making a large assumption that cases you would define as "mobbing" consist of a significant portion of people unaffected.
The thing about opinions nowadays is that they are manipulated right and left. It has become absolutely trivial to whip up a mob into a frenzy.
This isn't to say that any concerted movement against something one was not personally affected by is illegitimate. Clearly, one does not need to be a person of color to support BLM.
My question regarding the mobbing prevention was in the spirit of the first form.
Given the claims that (various high percentages above 50%) of RH users had one of these meme stocks, that should still drive the rating to 1-star.
Especially if you also count everyone as "affected" who bought through another broker and who saw those shares plummet once RH destroyed retail "investor" (read: gambler) demand.
In its absence, you'd have the Amazon effect -- accumulate five star volume, tank / exploit the product, coast as your average is very slowly dragged down.
"BOYCOTT, the refusal and incitement to refusal to have commercial or social dealings with any one on whom it is wished to bring pressure."
But Amazon has no incentive to do so, because they would sell less items. Maybe with Steam the target market of gamers can direct so much more backlash towards something that doesn't work than the general audience of Amazon.
People are pointing out in the comments that some of the details don’t line up, like him being based in the wrong city and him overhearing conversations while WFH.
Edit: Just called E*TRADE. They now don't allow GME nor AMC trades unless you're closing your position.
Well, there's a reliable source.
You also kinda had it coming when you called yourself "robin hood" and then immediately bent over the moment the slightest challenge appeared.
It's confusing to me. I'd think if they were being risk-averse or something they'd have stopped dealing in them entirely until the craziness passed. The "you can only sell, not buy" part seems... odd to me.
That's like, way over simplified but gets to the gist
[Edit cause spelling are hard]
(someone please correct if wrong)
Edit: I know they haven't halted selling, this is directly in response to a part of the parent's comment
That’s what I’m seeing in RH when I look at the small amount of Blackberry (BB) shared I own.
Second, if popular trading platforms artificially block demand, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, and the stock is going to plunge by this action alone.
Given Citadel's involvement, this is blatant market manipulation, and I hope people go to prison for this. Ftr, I never traded individual stocks, so I'm not affected, but this is still bullshit.
Regarding you theory, I don’t know if it’s blatant but I agree it’s suspect.
Melvin is a $GME short seller predicted to lose BILLIONS due to the people taking the free market back.
Citadel owns the app Robinhood.
Citadel banned purchases of new $GME shares on RH.
Market manipulation.
https://twitter.com/shane_riordan/status/1354786445668610049
^ quoted from here
Ooops their correction here:
https://twitter.com/shane_riordan/status/1354787975058616320
https://twitter.com/shane_riordan/status/1354787975058616320
"Citadel isn’t a majority owner of RH, but they DO pay RH a hefty figure to the app for consumer data. On top of the money paid to bail out Melvin.
All they have to do is threaten to pull that money for data from RH and RH pulls new share purchases of $GME.
It’s wild."
I've only seen mention of Citadel but the short squeeze on these stocks (blocked stocks) continuing could literally have made D1 Capital explode.
In the aftermath of this fiasco, perhaps Robinhood can get away with a small fine. Even a billion would be less than the collective sum all hedge funds involved could have lost had this upward price movement continued.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-28/dan-sundh...
So it's not Robinhood, persay, but rather Citadel.
Why did Citadel block purchasing of GME stock? Because Citadel just invested 2 billion dollars in Melvin Capital Management; one of the hedge funds that has a lot to lose as long as the GME stocks keep going up.
I'm not sure if Citadel can just refuse to purchase GME (RH could just go elsewhere), but maybe they said they wouldn't pay RH anymore for order flow unless they blocked it. But do we know that Citadel did this? I've only heard speculation to that effect.
https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1354853920762253315?s=2...
Setting a short position then cutting off trades is pretty textbook market manipulation
This is a jabberwocky sentence. It is syntactically correct but there is nothing in the real world to which it could be referring. Brokers do not "support" stocks.
> n. Nonsensical speech or writing. > adj. meaningless, worthless > adj. absurd, nonsense, non-sensical
From Wiki: "Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
Wonderful word.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/robinhood-investing-for-all/id...
They already have
1. No outstanding trades 2. a $0.00 balance 3. Contact support and (optionally?) give a reason
(1) and (2) make sense, but is (3) new?
I wonder if there is a mass exodus - there should be.
A lot of people are clinging to the hope that whatever came out of shorts covering their position being false. Whereas given the volume of the previous days it's highly likely they've already gone. Whoever goes in at this point is likely going to end up losing everything.
If you look at r/wallstreetbets, only a few people seem to have invested more than a couple of tens of thousands. The guy who came up with this idea to profit off of short squeeze seems to have invested only 53k. Most other people invested a few hundred or a few thousand. Also, people on r/wallstreetbets routinely show screenshots of their losses. It's kind of preposterous to move forward assuming these people don't know what they're doing, and Robinhood saved them...
These trading platforms are blatantly intervening to save the hedge funds, not the Reddit traders. Government may have a say in it, too, because they want market stability. And if these hedge have to sell their long positions to cover shorts, it could put a big dent in the market and even cause a larger scale crash.
I’m hoping RobinHood gets sued out of existence and many of these hedge funds burn. The industry’s response to this is stupid and classist: “we can’t have randos making money...” as irrational as the system is it is working as is.
Not to say that they'll cease to exist, but I doubt they'll remain the "#1 trading platform."
https://twitter.com/motherboard/status/1354798244455395328
EDIT: This is untrue, please refer to jaywalk's reply.
So this is really such a bad faith statement from Motherboard, because all of the ETF holders (probably 90% of the "half") can still sell their ETF's and thus their indirect $GME shares...
Also, there's this strange thing that some of the ratings disappear and come back later or not.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/robinhood-investing-for-all/id...
IMO Apple is making proactive moves to protect their store's rating system reputation, such as it is.
I've used RobinHood since 2016 (not my only brokerage) and the app continues to be fine. It's not a race car, it's more like a family sedan. The company has been reasonably good at messaging and a number of other brokerages also halted buying of $gme, $nok, etc.
So not only is RobinHood not getting a fair shake (we haven't even heard their side of things), but other brokerages are getting _way_ more than what's fair for them given that they did the exact same thing.
Ah, that's a good one.
RH app reviews right now are going to be way too emotional, and they'll stay there no matter what RH does in the coming days. This will take Apple's reputation down a notch on both ends--app developer and app reviewer.
Scanning the complaint quickly... it's not a strong case. The problem plaintiffs have is that the contract they signed lets Robinhood essentially refuse to trade if it wants to. In order to defeat that, you're going to have to argue that those contract provisions violate federal law and are therefore unenforceable. That's not really want the complaint does. Instead, it seems to argue that Robinhood's error was in failing to allow trades in GME in the first place, not in the reasoning for its failings. (At least they actually allege enough of this to potentially get discovery, which is better than some other complaints I've seen recently).
SEC needs to intervene quick
So, 1-star is even too much, jail time would be preferred.
After everyone threw a ton of money into the market the hedge funds control. “Dumb money” doesn’t feel like an inappropriate nickname.
Visually, allowing 1 to 5 stars inflates the way ratings look, because the first star is always present, even for the worst products.
Imagine if it was pie chart or a bar chart: the lowest rating would look like 20%, not 0%.
Or imagine a product where 50% of people gave it the lowest rating (1 star) and the rest gave it the highest rating (5 stars). This would be presented as a 3/5 star item, which visually appears quite a bit better than its real rating (50%).
**** (XX,XXX votes)
when displaying ratings (meaning average 4 star rating, for XX,XXX total votes) -- it is succinct and informative.
"Please don't fulminate."
That means please don't post comments in which indignation overwhelms information. That lowers signal/noise and escalates activation in others, which takes us away from curious conversation.
If there's this level of blatant corruption, who really thinks they won't get screwed out of their retirement savings in a few decades?
Music, taxis, retail, newspapers, politics and others have been disrupted by technology and the incumbents have suffered.
The establishment players have all seen this and they aren't going to let it happen again to them. They'll let technology in but only the way they want.
And now that deplatforming companies and powerful from credit-card, cloud providers, app stores, communications is normal and accepted they have more power and control than ever.
If I was robinhood I would do the same thing. Standing up for a principle is only going to get you shutdown and have everyone hate you after the fake news vilifies you and drags you through the gutter.