How Robinhood Misled the Poor and Rewarded the Rich

I've been learning more about that over the past 24 hours thanks to reader comments on reddit.

Some background info:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/whats-the-dtcc-and-h...

https://twitter.com/KralcTrebor/status/1355356755690139650

It looks like the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) increased margin requirements on GME stock on Thursday -- which forced Robinhood to post more collateral -- which drove Robinhood's decision to prevent users from buying more GME shares.

This adds another piece to the puzzle.

We need more clarity on: Why did the DTCC make its decision? Was that decision properly communicated to the market, or did some firms get early access to the info? What conflicts of interest do they have? Was the DTCC lobbied by other Wall Street players to make that change on Thursday?

However, Robinhood clients do not get to wash their hands of responsibility, because let's be honest: what did they expect to get for a free service? Are all these people seriously so deluded that they have expected that a company will provide them free service out of the goodness of their heart? Again, Robinhood outright lied, and they must not get away with this. But we have to educate people that there are very few (if any) "free" services that won't have to resort to these antics. They have to make money somehow, and if it's not obvious how, that should be an immediate red flag.

One that I only learned about a few days ago involves an investor who was erroneously shown a -$700K balance on his Robinhood account and then killed himself as a result[0].

Back in September of 2019, I made a deposit into Robinhood. The next morning I received an automatically generated email saying that the deposit had bounced and that my account was now limited. I checked my bank account and saw that the funds had indeed been removed. The email included the ACH error code "R26", which corresponds to a malformed ACH file. I quickly learned that every single deposit on that date had failed [1].

No worries, I thought, I'll just email support and let them know. Unfortunately their support was completely useless and did not follow through with what they said.

I switched to TD Ameritrade (and the thinkorswim platform) and have not looked back.

I think Robinhood needs a sort of Uber-style restructuring. It's clear they do not care about their clients.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/06/17/20-y...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/d0joa2/solution_...

The author only presents the GME Citadel conspiracy theory without even presenting the "capital requirements" theory. He even says that there is no evidence of this conspiracy theory.

This is what writing looks like when the author appeals to your emotional distrust of wall street, rather than to actually try to inform you.

Apparently there's article after article saying that silver is the hot new thing, and that you should buy immediately.

It makes me wonder how much it costs to run a disinformation campaign. Do journalists have an informal price? Depends on the outlet, I guess.

It was comical seeing all the articles pop up simultaneously, and of course /r/wallstreetbets is mocking it all.

1) Misreport the Melvin funder as the market maker Citadel, when it was the investment fund Citadel. Two different entities.

2) Hand waves away settlement issues altogether (never mentioning the DTCC), when they are the heart of the issue. If Robinhood has to post large amounts of collateral for every GME purchase (and sales reduce the collateral requirements), doesn’t that directly explain their behavior? No conspiracy needed?

So little actual insight in a blog reporting to do a “deep dive” into the situation.

People keep saying this, but I just don't see how this would work in the real world.

NOTE: I am not a financial professional, what follows is my meager understanding. Please feel free to correct me with facts and information.

Here's how it COULD work, but DID NOT work: Hedge funds short so much stock, SO QUICKLY that the increase in virtual inventory drives the share price down. Here's why it DID NOT work that way: The hedge funds did not actually do this. They kept their short position open expecting GME to go to 0.

In fact, if hedge funds DID attempt this, it would certainly be market manipulation, which is something the SEC definitely watches for, especially when large players do it.

People keep saying things like predatory shorts drove the price down. As far as I can tell, these hedge funds told a story about why they though GME would go bankrupt. In turn, someone started a story about how this particular trade by these particular hedge funds was EVIL, which is just zany to me.

----

I do think that Hedge Funds and Traders accumulate too much money for themselves. I don't think the GME trade is a particularly good way to fix this. There are plenty of other Hedge Funds out there.

Is there any way for the casual consumer to compare the quality of execution of various brokers?

This is why I stopped using them last summer. They messed up a few of my trades. Either by giving me a worse price than was quoted or my reversing the trade after it had already gone through.

After it happened a second time in a short time frame, I knew something was up. I closed all my trades and took all my money out.

What's really weird is that these "errors" started happening only after I started making good trades. When I lost money on a trade (which happened a lot for the first few years of casual trading), I NEVER had an execution error. Then, when I had my first good run of trading in years, all of the sudden I had TWO trades messed up within a week of each other???

It was all too conincidental for me. Either they were messing up my trades because of incompetence or they were letting someone take the other end of my trades.

Whichever it was, I left.

Robinhood had an insane run of good press and was able to within years of crap product. Now they are finally getting what's coming to them.

It's only controversial among people who don't understand how market transactions work.

The author seem to omit how much money customers of Robinhood made since its inception.

buying millions of GME stocks makes you a poor?

what about the people who can't even affort trying to gamble money on bubbles?

they are "ultra poor"?

this whole thing makes me want to puke on this shitty planet

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit...

>Market makers stand ready to buy or sell stock from or to customers; they try to buy for a bit less than they sell at, and pocket the spread. If you go out into the market and say “hey I’ll buy anyone’s stock for $10,” and a really smart hedge fund comes to you and sells you stock for $10, that’s probably bad. You’ve probably made a mistake. The hedge fund is selling you the stock for $10 because it knows it’s worth $8. This is called “adverse selection.”

>More subtly, if a really big mutual fund comes to you and sells you stock for $10, that also may be bad. The mutual fund is probably selling lots of stock, because it’s so big; it sells you a little, then sells a little more, then a little more, until it pushes the price down to $8. The mutual fund isn’t necessarily smart, but by virtue of being big and doing big trades, it moves the price; if you are on the other side of its trades, you get run over. This is also a kind of adverse selection: You buy at $10 and are stuck selling at $8. Part of the spread that market makers earn in public markets—the difference between their buying and selling prices—compensates them for adverse selection, the risk of being run over by a counterparty who knows something they don’t.

>Market makers, the textbook theory goes, would much rather trade with retail orders. Retail investors generally don’t know much, so if you buy stock from them you’re probably not making a mistake. And retail orders are generally small and uncorrelated: One investor buys a little, another comes along a moment later and sells a little, it’s all pretty random, and you’re not facing an avalanche of steady sell orders that push the price down. Trading with retail is so nice that market makers—wholesalers—will both give retail orders a tighter spread (pay more to buy their stock, charge less to sell stock to them) and pay their broker for the privilege of doing it.

In fact, they're specifically prohibited from offering a worse price than the public exchanges due to regulation NBBO (national best bid order). The SEC penalty last year was only for failing to ensure best execution, which is slightly different than offering worse prices than the NBBO, since the former also requires them to take into account other market making firms that might offer a better price.

This. A thousand times this.

I'm so sick of people dismissing everyone's concerns as as conspiracy theories. There is a clear motivation for RH's actions, basically nothing stopping them from acting on that motivation, and billions of dollars on the line. Their alibi seems to check out, but that doesn't mean they acted appropriately or that we shouldn't investigate them to be sure.