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Contracts do not override a broker's fiduciary duty to its clients. A fiduciary duty is the highest standard of care recognized by law and requires the agent to act in the best interest of the principal.

Once the evidence is presented, a plaintiff may find that Robinhood did not act with the highest standard of care, did not do everything it could have done to prepare for and handle the situation.

We don't know because the evidence hasn't been disclosed, a major part of any lawsuit is to give plaintiffs an opportunity to assess the evidence produced by the defendant to determine if any wrongdoing took place.

Rh will argue best financiary duty was to protect his customers from the volatility

And the question will be posed if making it an absolute certainty that your customers lose value is a justified action because it reduces volatility. And RH will have a tough time arguing. “Yes, yesterday you had 2mil but you didn’t know if it would double or halve. Today you know for sure that you have 100k, so why aren’t you happy? I’m just looking out for your best interests!”

They let their customers sell which was probably a fiduciary responsibility.

An obligation to maintain the market for a stock because a portion of it's owners are your customers would be a bizarre responsibility.

> They let their customers sell which was probably a fiduciary responsibility.

Given the context of gamestop's stock, only allowing to sell stocks is the exact opposite of protecting the customer's best interests.

I mean, the high demand for gamestop's stock was motivated by the rally behind a retail-backed short squeeze, where hedge funds were reported to have massively shorted gamestop's stocks. Barring customers from buying more gamestop stocks meant they were unable to strengthen their positions and thus profit from the short squeeze,and pushing them to sell represented a pressure to kill off the short squeeze, thus acting on the exact opposite of their customer's best interests.

Then there's the reported news that one of RobinHood's new backers ends up being one of the hedge funds that stood to loose massively due to this retail-backed short squeeze.

They blockee when it was at the top tho.. and most shares had been bought. There was 0 volume.

> They blockee when it was at the top tho..

That's a weird re-phrasing of "they caused the stock to drop by manipulating the market through blocking buys".

And then there's the backpedalling by RobinHood when they reinstated buys but at a very limited rate of what? One per customer?

There was 0 buy volume from retail, but there were sell volume, thus pushing the price down.

> Rh will argue best financiary duty was to protect his customers from the volatility

Wouldn't that line of argument determine that traders would have the fiduciary duty to only allow their clients to sell on price hikes and buy on price drops?

Because otherwise that line of reasoning is highly arbitrary in the sense of what RobinHood claims is in the best interests of his customer, and thus very unlike anything regarding fiduciary responsibility.

Have any claimants presented compelling arguments for the judge to throw out that contract provision?

In short, no, not that I've seen. However, there also hasn't particularly been much of a reason to yet--there haven't been any motions that need argumentation, and the defense (Robinhood) hasn't responded yet to the cases.

One side-effect is the suits provide a lens on the parts of the T&Cs that retail investors do not like.

Court action (and senate hearings)have the ability to hold the publics attention under certain circumstances. Especially if there is a reviled antagonist, for which hedge funds are a good casting

You mean that somewhere in the huge Wall Of Text..err Terms of Service, they can say that they want my firstborn child for human sacrifice and once I click Accept, I am a goner ?

Did Robinhood make people click that they accept the terms?

> That really only leaves two kinds of claims that might have legs: arguing that Robinhood violated securities laws, and arguing conspiracy on the part of hedge funds. The first part is difficult to win on because many of the complainants will simply lack the standing to do so (you have to have owned the stocks in question and bought/sold at a manipulated price to show standing, and since the complaints are generally on the theme of "we tried to buy but couldn't", they fail that)

Someone that owned GME shares could argue that by restricting buying but not selling shares, Robinhood was acting to lower the value of this asset. They might argue that in this situation the only fair thing to do is to restrict buying and selling altogether.

>Someone that owned GME shares could argue that by restricting buying but not selling shares, Robinhood was acting to lower the value of this asset. They might argue that in this situation the only fair thing to do is to restrict buying and selling altogether.

Whether that's fair is debatable. If you held GME shares and wanted to get out, but couldn't because robinhood restricted sells for no reason (ie. they couldn't execute buys because they couldn't put up the collateral, but they can still process sells because they don't need collateral for that), that can also be construed as unfair.

> restrict buying and selling altogether

Robinhood is a brokerage, they are not the entire stock market.

Robinhood has 0 ability to prevent people from selling GME in the market at large.

It kind of feels like some people don't understand that Robinhood is only a gateway into a much larger system, and is fundamentally different than an "app/game" that controls the entire system on it's own servers.