That was their second post of the day. Their first post [1] made no mention of liquidity or clearinghouse deposit requirements, but rather framed the decision entirely in terms of "helping" customers deal with volatility.

That post was at best misleading.

[1] https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/keeping-customers-...

Well they sure made selling really easy during the architected dip.

Why allow so many new users to buy those positions before they blocked buys if this was coming? I mean, the prices were elevated before it got to this. Seems like a situation of let's ride the free customer acquisition and figure it out later.

They happily took the huge influx of new users that had no knowledge of this. And many got screwed. They couldn't average down on their position. And a ton of buyers were removed. So the price got out of control. Many panicked because of it.

I'm not on RH but added more at 170 and it came with several partial fills of 1 and 2 stocks. That was RH users getting screwed as a ton of buyers were removed. Trading was not halted on the downward spiral.

They could have said - hey guess what - 750k RH users (whatever it is) that own GME cannot buy this stock, so consider this before you sell. Some kind of warning that passed the attorneys. How could they not see this coming?

Any way it went down - RH is done. I hope they "pivot" into a worse situation.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that was at the end of the trading day, when people already made it clear their original BS blog post wasn't convincing anyone. IMO Robinhood is clearly in the wrong. It may not be as malignant as the Citadel collusion theory, but they did in fact treat their own customers like idiots. And it backfired.

Yeah, you're right. I think this article lacks specifics, but they did mention capital requirements. I was referring to their previous blog entry: https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/keeping-customers-.... In addition, their founder @VLAD on Twitter cited misinformation as a reason.

As for conspiracy, I'd venture to guess that inconsistencies/hypocrisies and opacity turned people into cynics. I'm not saying RH is hypocritical, by the way. Instead, the hypocrisies of other platforms made people trust RH less. For instance, I saw numerous accusations that RH was helping wall street by limiting buying but not selling.

This came out after the market closed, but the limitations were put in place before the market even opened.

Plus, they never give a reason in this. They make vague references to things that could be a reason, but don't clearly state what the reason was. Leaving it unclear like this is horrible PR, and will continue to let the conspiracies spread.

That blog post was much more vague, and harder to understand than the clear explanation two comments above. I can now see that they're obliquely referencing their collateral requirements, but that wouldn't have been clear to me before reading JumpCrisscross's comment. I think g9yuayon's point stands.

That's still very vague.

They had a chance to educate people, but nah can't do that.