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Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions the app misleading him into believing he had incurred the debt, but never goes into how it was misleading. Was he actually in that amount of debt, or was he misled? If he was in that level of debt, was he misled about the risks he was taking?

I'm not a fan of the argument "they shouldn't have let him make decisions he didn't understand" because I believe the onus is on us to know what we are doing before we do it, and arguments like these are what led us to our current regulatory framework disallowing investors into markets unless they meet capital requirements, essentially pricing everyone but rich people out of markets.

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Robinhood’s app is notorious for indicating a margin call when one is not forthcoming for complex options strategies (options spreads, in this case).

PSA: Please use a real brokerage when participating in capital markets. Fidelity is my recommendation, but others are at parity if not close. No one should be using Robinhood.

More people would if mobile apps weren't horrible. I have schwab and fidelity and the lack of basic features like listing option greeks, auto refreshing tick values, L2 data by established brokerages is baffling.

Why the need to do this on mobile? This is serious stuff. You're not just ordering dinner.

Do it on a desktop, and know what you're doing.

This is a silly no true Scotsman argument. A screen of information is a screen of information. There's nothing that can be displayed on a desktop screen that is somehow incompatible with the pixels on my phone or tablet, which both have higher resolution than my desktop.

Funny you should mention Fidelity - I have their "full view" thing set up so I can see my accounts at other banks and brokerages on one screen. Late last year I did a wire transfer from my bank to a brokerage, and the brokerage credited me for the amount immediately, before the bank deducted it. On January 1, the sum of all my accounts was some not-insubstantial number of dollars higher than reality, and that's what Fidelity captured as my starting balance for the year. Then everything settled, and I logged in to Fidelity around January 3 to a message that since the beginning of the year my investments had lost that not-insubstantial amount of value. Heart skipped a beat.

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