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Comment by vga805 | Hacker News Reader

Multiple brokerages shut down buying due to the collateral requirements that were raised. Robinhood seems like the fall guy here, hopefully people start asking the right questions about the collateral and the manipulation there.

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other brokerages simply put up the money. this meant that while huge swaths of the retail investors in the US (and parts of Europe) were not allowed to buy GME, other retail investors had no issues.

to top it off, certain brokerages only allowed sell orders.

this meant a huge imbalance in the market.

i really don’t get how this is legal and why heads aren’t rolling.

case in point: saxo bank let me trade GME without an issue. but since most brokerages did not put up the new collateral, and only allowed sell...

basically this is a case of market manipulation by way of changing the rules in realtime.

i get why they changed the rules, i don’t get why the SEC is not removing the authorisation of the participants in this scheme and also not prosecuting the companies.

i’m clearly missing some info here and need to read some more on this subject.

>other brokerages simply put up the money.

Nope, multiple other brokerages including Interactive Brokers also suspended options trading and opening any new positions in the so-called "meme" stocks.

So what are you proposing? All brokerages must put up the collateral no matter what? Surely it is up to the individual businesses whether they can afford to, want to take the risk, etc.

Some people seem to be suggesting that when RH got the collateral call for funds they didn't have on hand, they should have instantly gone into receivership and wound the whole operation down, closing all accounts. Or something like that. They probably don't mean that, but it's the logical conclusion of what they're saying. Always have the required collateral or face instant annihilation.

No brokerage is under any obligation to use their own funds as collateral in order to allow you to trade using unsettled funds or margin on highly volatile securities. A brokerage could be left holding a huge bag here if they put up their own funds to allow someone to buy GME, then the incoming unsettled funds from the customer bounce, and now the brokerage is left holding shares of GME worth $100 or whatever and they've incurred a huge loss.

You are NOT entitled to trading with a brokerage's funds as if they were your own.

For margin trading, sure, but IIRC Robinhood halted all trading, even with your own money.

I think it has more to do with Robinhood giving away free trading, while the trades themselves have a non-zero variable cost to Robinhood. Since their revenue comes from selling insightful user trade data, a run on GME isn't insightful and had diminishing returns (my hypothesis anyways).

I’ve seen claims that having settled funds doesn’t matter, that the brokerage must keep collateral at the clearinghouse and they cannot use customer’s money to do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25981493. The clearinghouse suddenly demanded a lot more collateral for that stock (because its eventual value is so uncertain) and a lot of brokers couldn’t or didn’t want to meet it.

They also didn’t want to say anything that might give an impression of being insolvent (especially when it isn’t true).

The main problem was majority of the GME interest was on Robinhood platform. So other brokers were able to get away with deposits or shorter blocking.

The next squeeze will put pressure on the other brokers given the movement of accounts out of Robinhood. I feel this works out in favor of Robinhood and as they don’t need to deal with gambling style traders.

>other brokerages simply put up the money

...assuming they had the money. On the day they suspended trading, they also raised $2B in funding the same night. A few days later they partially unrestricted trading.

That is absolutely not the reason that they publicly stated they stopped allowing purchasing and only allowed selling.

I’d dance on the grave of this company.

Well then what is the reason? I've not seen anything else. The CEO was cagey when asked about liquidity, but every official release has suggested that the collateral requirements were the problem.

Actually it is the reason they stated

There was a several hour period one evening where some “it’s for your own good because of the volatility” message was the first comms from the company on the topic.

That's not what the message said. It said "to protect our customers." Which is consistent with the capital requirements reason. If RH didn't meet the requirements, the entire company (all of their customers; even those who knew nothing about game) would go into receivership and the company unwound. Meanwhile, no one can sell their shares while this happens. Not meeting their capital requirements would have been very, very bad for all of RH's customers.

Who cares? Companies rush out dumb comms under pressure then walk em back or change them.

They're not obligated to stick to the first thing they said on a topic -- especially when it's customer comms.

It's not a good source for answering what they did / why they did it.

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