Robinhood is still severely limiting trading | Hacker News Reader

Robinhood is still severely limiting trading

cnbc.com

103 pointsdrocer8855 comments

They're legitimately experiencing a liquidity crisis right now, and their CEO went on the news and lied about it to the public. I'm out of other explanations; GM moved 0.7% today, and it has trading restrictions? Are they afraid that people will mistype GME?

Did he lie about it or was just not clear? RH and the other brokerages have said it was capital requirements imposed by the clearing houses, which makes sense given Fidelity and Vanguard were not having this issue. My question is why did the clearing houses make this decision? Whats the risk management logic here?

Well I don't want to say positive things about financial risk models, but it does make sense that they flash higher risk when the price has moved so much.

Basically, if I'm lending you money to buy something and that thing is suddenly moving a whole lot more than it used to, it's prudent to ask for more collateral to cover your potential losses.

Apple trades an order of magnitude more per day than any of the stocks that were halted. So why are there no liquidity issues there but there are with the stocks that keep being halted?

Because your collateral requirement can vary based on the stock volatility.

GME moved about 2/3 as much as AAPL today.

On Tuesday, GME traded more volume than any other stock, and that's on a day when the total market volume was much higher than usual (Wednesday is now the all-time record for share volume).

My guess is that Robinhood's deposits with the DTCC are running dry, so they're charging more to settle any transactions to manage their own risk. Robinhood then locks down a bunch of popular stocks in addition to the volatile ones.

In a way, its a tragedy of the commons. It would be both sad and ironic if the only casualty of this black swan event were robinhood. But, they likely still have avenues open to them toward recovery.

Because if RH were to collapse the clearing house would be left holding the bag. And clearing houses don't have that kind of money. So DTCC (the main clearing house) going under would stop pretty much all trading in the US.

So the clearing house requires 100% collateral for some stocks now instead of up to 5%. RH can't afford that and GME has been eating up 50% of RH daily trades.

> So DTCC (the main clearing house) going under would stop pretty much all trading in the US.

What would be the impact of that on the global financial markets? On the real economy?

I think we're going to see some difficult regulations on retail investors in the not too far future.

Realistically? Nobody is going to let DTCC go under, ever. But they don't want to be the one begging for a government bailout either.

Sounds like clearing houses need more insurance themselves.

Yeah, looks like they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

On one hand if they don't admit their liquidity problems, people will blame them for playing the HFs game.

If they do admit, well.. it's pretty much game over for them.

I wouldn't say their CEO lied yesterday. More like he talked a lot without really saying anything.

On CNBC yesterday, Vlad's exact words were "No, to be clear, there is no liquidity problem" [1].

I'm willing to accept that it wasn't a total lie yesterday, and the situation has developed. I think we're past the point to where that statement would still be truthful today.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/29/robinhood-ceo-vlad-tenev-tap...

Forgive my ignorance: what's a liquidity crisis? They use client money for client equity orders so they don't need to front anything right?

I have a comment from earlier today on another post that I think is accurate enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25958644

Thanks! Kudos on the excellent comment.

So the root issue is a mix of more users, more trading and more people going long, all of which increase their capital requirements.

It makes perfect sense now why Robinhood are having issues now. I’m surprised they haven’t cancelled promotions or delayed letting people use proceeds from sales. Do you know if that’s permitted?

I was surprised when they started dicking about with what people could trade. That seemed very suspicious to me. But if they’re worried about new users piling in and all grabbing 1k of GameStop, I can see how only a small bump in users sucks up all their spare cash.

To kinda tl;dr 015a's comment (which you should read, it's excellent), a liquidity crisis, generally, is when you start running out of cash to settle things that require cash, for various practical and/or regulatory reasons. You might have plenty of other assets on your books, but you're short on cash or cash equivalents.

For a brokerage, the T+2 transaction settlement system requires brokers post collateral while a trade is in the process of being settled. T+2 means 2 business days.

On top of that Robinhood does all kinds of promotional stuff that's a drain on their cash position like giving away stock to new users.

It is an excellent comment. I learnt a lot!

T+2 must prolong the agony. So new users turn up (which costs capital for their promos), deposit money (which drones clear yet), buy something (using more capital), sell it and buy something else because why not lock in those gains (using more capital) and so on.

What do brokers do in these cases? It seems like they should have a lender who guarantees capital in the even of volume spikes. It seems like a missed opportunity, I’d lend them cash for a few percent a week :)

Oh they do.

"On Thursday, Robinhood was forced to stop customers from buying a number of stocks, like GameStop, that were heavily traded this week. To continue operating, it drew on a line of credit from six banks amounting to between $500 million and $600 million to meet higher margin, or lending, requirements from its central clearing facility for stock trades, known as the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/technology/robinhood-fund...

My friend's uncle said he got a tip that what happened is citadel buys servers from intel who called robinhood on the rico line and told them to kill amd.

That restricted list has some odd ones in it. Starbucks and GM are both limited to 1 share per day. I really wonder what's going on behind the scenes.

Starbucks has high volume/volatiliy from its earnings call earlier this week. GM just dropped major news (only EVs by 2035) also causing some stock buzz.

Getting flashbacks to Mt. Gox's behavior in early 2014...

Can anyone here verify that this was possible while markets were open? Buy call option, exercise, get more shares than RH's trade limit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l82y7u/how_...

Fastest way to put Robinhood into liquidation so you can get a fraction of your account value back years later.

That's just how a call option works. I don't know the specifics of custodianship around an executed option and what collateral the buyer's broker is responsible for upon execution, but it's probably equivalent to buying 100 shares.

With respect to it being possible -- if RH denied options holders the right to execute they'd be prosecuted and fined an enormous amount. There is quite literally a contract that says the buyer has the right to acquire shares in a certain scenario -- the buyer's broker responsibility here is simply to facilitate, and is in no place legally to deny that right.

They had AMD and Starbucks on the limit of one share ownership? Huh, these companies aren’t even part of the Reddit frenzy.

AMD and SBUX just had earnings calls this week. They'll naturally have high volume and volatility.

I have been investing in the market for over 15 years. Since when do earnings announcements cause a brokerage to limit buying?

Also AMD is pretty close to AMC lol. Seems absurd but they also restricted trading on GM.

Other brokerages still have restrictions as well. I haven't been able to write a covered call against my AMC shares. Hopefully they let us "normal" traders start writing options next week, and the premiums remain relatively high.

If they legitimately are experiencing a liquidity crisis, then limit purchases on securities other than the ones retail investors are buying in their war with the hedge funds. Go limit Apple, Microsoft or Tesla.

Yea, I wonder if Robinhood can survive into next week. Clearly their DTCC collateral requirements are skyrocketing and tapping out their credit lines wasn’t enough.

50-50 chance that Robinhood files bankruptcy and WallStreetBets traders get stuck waiting months or years for their positions to settle.

That would be the ultimate irony after the tantrums they threw yesterday while Robinhood was drowning.

Wouldn't that, basically, guarantee the short squeeze, though? If people can't access their broker, they can't sell.

Or can Robinhood start liquidating their customer's positions without authorization?

I think it all depends on how they will assign ownership to the assets. Stocks are, at sometimes, a surprisingly tricky case to determine ownership [0].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-07-14/banks-...

I can't see this happening, why wouldn't investors just give them a bridge loan? They'd be insane to let their (massive) investment go to zero, when the alternative is an ultra-short term loan with basically no risk (the funds are just stuck at the clearinghouse as I understand it).

They did get new investment (the story isn't clear if it's a bridge loan or equity)

https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/29/robinhood-raises-1b-after-...

According to the NYT story it sounds like a convertible note or something similar:

"Investors who provide new financing to Robinhood will receive additional equity in the company. The investors will get that equity at a discounted valuation tied to the price of Robinhood shares when the company goes public, two of the people said."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/technology/robinhood-fund...

Maybe their investors can’t come up with multiple billions in the next few days?

And what if GME goes to $1,000 Monday, or $10? And Robinhood still gets liquidated? Where is there no risk?

The risk is that the million or whatever new users who just funded their account with an ACH transfer from their checking account don't actually have those funds in their bank.

In the past three days, they've taken a $2.5B emergency credit line from JP Morgan and $1B in emergency funding from their investors. This all happened before these trade restrictions.

At the scale we're talking about here, it gets to a point very quickly where nothing can save them except government intervention. Robinhood may not be at that point yet (and I very much doubt the government would step in to help them), but its also the case that their eligibility for huge loans like they need is hurt because the measures they need to take to remain solvent (locking down trades) is also hurting their future revenue (users are concerned and may pull out). That's why liquidity events are so scary; everything just stops, and when you stop a market it sometimes can't ever get going again.

Is there any evidence that RH's collateral requirements specifically are increasing?

The DTCC typically has a restricted list of specific securities with higher than usual collateral requirements, usually because of volatility - it seems that in RH's case, their use base mostly wants to trade stocks on this restricted list, causing severe issues for RH.

Despite the restricted trades GME is doing well today. It will be a bloodbath for the shorts next week.

yup, so much for that media narrative blaming WSB and Robinhood for manipulating the market. Everyone expecting GME to tank but it refuse to. Shorts will keep being forced to cover at higher and higher prices.

Why would next week in particular be a bloodbath for the shorts? I think you're falling victim to a sliding timeline here - when I asked people up until late Wednesday, they consistently said that today was the bloodbath day.

Because the short ratio is still over 100%. With the clearing house catching up on the settling trades over the weekend, the counterparty risk goes down, allowing the trading platforms to lift the trade restriction, and allowing hordes of WSB to continue to bid up GME. Other moneys will smell blood and join in as they have seen how well GME held up today despite the restricted trades.

That's just the story of any bubble. Lots of people will bid it up because they expect other people to join in, until at some point they stop believing others will join in. I can't disprove it, because bubbles do of course happen, but that doesn't say much about how long this particular one will continue.

I guess what I'd encourage you to do is write some notes for yourself about exactly what you expect will happen, so that when the justifications for the bubble change again you'll be able to notice and hopefully get out in time.

Unironically, this feels more and more like QAnon. It doesn't matter that the bloodbath didn't happen when Q said it would, because what Q actually meant was 3 weeks from now, except in this case Q is Martin Shkreli or any of the other hundreds of hedge fund managers hanging out on WSB, stirring the pot while laughing all the way to the bank.

So as someone involved in this trade for the lulz, I had the exact same thought today, though you could probably have framed it a little less... sarcastically.

I couldn't help but notice the "this Friday is the day", "no wait this Monday", "no wait..." evolving narrative has felt an awful lot like folks dealing with cognitive dissonance. The parallel to qanon ("Trump will take over before the inauguration", "no wait during", "no wait March 4th"...) is definitely there.

Now I absolutely don't believe there's any nefarious orchestration behind the scenes. I think it's straight up groupthink.

But I'm up a decent amount on the trade so far and this realization absolutely made me rethink my exit strategy.

Was today not a bloodbath? GME closed Thursday at $193.60 and closed today at $325. That's an absolutely murderous day for a short.

It's hard to imagine anyone's holding a short position at this point without being prepared to tolerate at least a couple days of inflated prices. Anyone expecting a "normal" short would have bailed out on Tuesday.

Thought experiment:

Lets say everyone(or just the people who are in GME) decided to liquidate their holding on RH now, ie. they are fed up with that exchange for various reasons. From what I understand they would not be able to pay out funds to sellers? If so this would create a 1920's style run on their exchange that could spill over into other exchanges? I am genuinely curious as it would behoove RH to let people keep buying vs. sell only.

You wouldn't be able to transfer the money out until it settles.

Stock has a 2 day settlement period, so Robinhood could pay out, but it would have a 2 day delay before an ACH transfer would start when liquidating their account.

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