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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is, Robinhood is going to come out ahead on this fiasco. There are few good alternatives

I don't know if people have already forgotten, but it used to cost 5$ - 10$ per trade to buy stocks before robinhood came along. For better or worse, they made trading cheaper and much easier for newcomers. Brokerages like TD Ameritrade, E-Trade, Schwab used to charge outrageous fees for trades, but still sold the order flows.

Seems that you get a slightly worse price in exchange for the lack of the $5 trade fee: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/why-fr...

Yeah, they got a bunch of free publicity and a huge spike of new users. Even if 95% of them quit in rage, you're still dealing with solid growth numbers.

That's not true at all. There are many better alternatives. I have no idea why people would choose Robinhood besides superficial nonsense like 'it has the best UI'.

UI and UX matter and can be killer features.

yeah, I wish there was something with a similarly smooth UI that could do custodial accounts for children

On twitter I noticed that much of the heat against the CEO has died down. I think most people have forgiven him.

I think all that heat was driven by uneducated (market-wise) people furiously commenting to elected officials with a similar lack of market-related education. After some education, the angry masses realized that the CEO had nothing to do with anything that affected them. They just paid some market tuition.

Indeed, it was easy for politicians to try and capitalize on the event (stock market rigged for the rich saga) when in reality it was financial regulation that caused RH to have to stop allowing buy orders in GME.

> it was financial regulation

By “financial regulation” do you mean capital requirements being set by unknown individuals at the DTCC according to a formula that is unknown to the public and, by his own admission, even the CEO of Robinhood himself? I don’t know what I’d call that but it’s not what one typically thinks of as financial regulation.

> besides superficial nonsense like 'it has the best UI'.

The idea that UX/UI on a consumer oriented product like this is "superficial" seems bizarre to me.

Randomly getting my TD Ameritrade account shut down without explanation (they specifically state that they wont give you a reason and tell you to not ask), and all my positions closed (for a loss) a week after moving to them was a pretty good reason to move to Robinhood. I hadn't even applied for margin.

Robinhood seems to people, however ignorant the impression may be, that they don't act like the Big Evil Wall Street Corp guys. So it's not unreasonable to use a good platform for analysis and use Robinhood to trade.

Were you possibly abusing their Day Trading rules?

FYI: they will get a little testy if you have more than three round trips without registering as a day trader.

No, I've never day traded. I hadn't even sold anything yet. There was really no valid explanation.

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