Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

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> ... took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco

God I'm so sick of hearing this. It comes from people who seriously don't know what happened.

let me explain: RH had (and still has) a service that you can trade immediately on signing up and sending funds rather than waiting for them to clear. This mostly works out fine because people buy different things and you have the underlying assets as security so it tends to work out, meaning it's not a risk of a huge loss. Put another way: the convenience of RH lending you money (because that's actually what's happening) is counterbalanced by the additional business they get.

When GME popped off, they got a ton of sign ups to buy GME. This wasn't people using their own money to buy GME. This was RH lending you money to buy GME. And suddenly it didn't balance out. RH actually had a huge long GME position effectively. They actually borrowed a billion dollars to cover that and that was insufficient. So they stopped lending money to buy GME to avoid insolvency.

Remember too that they are lending you money on the promise you would fund the account. If people bought GME at $100 and it dropped to $30, RH would be left holding the bag as a significant percentage of people would simply avoid the loss by not funding their accounts. RH may have recourse to pursue that in court but that's going to get expensive and is a losing option all around.

That's literally all it was.

Some people were so delusional about what was going to happen with GME. They thought that since the open short interest exceeded the stock actively traded, the shares were going to go to infinity or something like that. That was never going to happen.

Pretty much everything you wrote is incorrect. You are describing margin lending, which had nothing to do with the issue. Robinhood instead blocked trading even for fully funded accounts. The problem wasn't the money that Robinhood lent you, but rather the fact that they themselves didn't have enough collateral to get cleared for the increased risk posed by these stocks. They were posing as a first-class brokerage without having the financial backing for it.

Moreover, the issue brought their business model into public spotlight, and people realized the problems with making money by selling order flows and the conflicts of interest that came with it.

My understanding is most people aren't commenting on this coherently†. The problem that halted Robinhood's GME trades, as I understand it, was that they had insufficient collateral to cover their clearing requirements. Clearing collateral isn't customer money; it's funds that clearinghouses require brokerages to post to protect them from each other. This, as I understand it, is money Robinhood was required to have on hand regardless of whether they had the money from customers to back trades. The amount is based in large part on the volatility of the stocks they're trading, and papers the illusion that stocks trade instantly when in fact the actual trade takes days to settle, during which the price of a volatile stock can swing wildly.

My understanding is that nothing you can do with customer trading funds will mitigate or offset your clearing collateral requirements. Brokerages that want to clear trades just have to have a big chunk of segregated money set aside to keep participating in the market. Robinhood ran out.

† because it's complicated, and there are lots of simple explanations you can come up with that are wrong, and we all have an Internet nerd tendency to fixate on a couple of axioms and derive the rest of the world from them, rather than reading the huge legal documents that set these things out

>That's literally all it was.

No; that's really not what it was.

This was not about margin lending to Robinhood customers. It was about a multi-billion dollar increase in collateral required by the NSCC due to a large volume of unsettled trades in highly volatile stocks.

ref. https://fortune.com/2021/02/02/robinhood-gamestop-restricted...

And follow that to its logical conclusion. why were those unsettled trades? And no this isn't a T+2 issue.

This is blatantly wrong. The entire problem was the standard settlement delay, which requires sufficient collateral to derisk the settlement period -- regardless if they are from instant deposits or made from cash accounts. Robinhood could not have kept operating even if instant deposits were disabled and every account had margin disabled.

It really is a T+2 issue.

The NSCC has a rule-driven model that tries to make sure that it holds an appropriate amount of collateral for each participant based on risk of default between trade and settlement.

That includes a core capital model that’s derived primarily from value-at-risk based on portfolio size, volatility and the usual things.

It also has an excess capital premium charge which varies according to the extent to which the core requirement is large vis-a-vis a participant’s excess net capital (excess over the minimum regulatory capital required by the SEC); because those are precisely the cases where default is more likely.

In the case of Robinhood, it seems like their internal risk management team had failed to take into account the excess capital premium (which is a large problem on its own), and that premium was particularly large based on how poorly capitalized Robinhood was.

You can go look up details on the NSCC model; it doesn’t care whether your clients are trading on margin.

You really are quite on the wrong side of this discussion: where are you getting your information?

The fact that other brokerages could handle the counterparty risk with stronger financials than Robinhood (eg: by continuing to permit securities purchases) does highlight reputational risk in that you're clearly running an inferior brokerage compared to the competition. Ordinary market conditions wouldn't add visibility to this fact, but unfortunately there was always the risk and the situation had occurred.

Well sure, a new upstart brokerage doesn't have the spare capital when new collateral requirements are imposed with little warning. Otoh, they were able to get access to more capital in a couple days, so from a business continuity perspective it was fine. They still missed out on a couple days of trading though.

I've never done business with Robinhood, but they never seemed to be a quality brokerage. I seem to recall they didn't support limit orders for some time (but I could be misremembering). I do thank them for their work in reducing retail comissions to zero though.

They also prevented trading by people who had long running, funded accounts. It was a mess and it wasn't only GME.

This is not true, and it's rare to see someone so confidently be so wrong.

This may be true. But it's also true that Robinhood's business model took a massive reputation hit amongst its core user base as a result of this.

Some people were utterly delusional about what was going to happen with GME, but Robinhood's business model was based around providing low friction trades to the sort of consumer who makes casual trades based on what they hear on the internet: i.e. exactly the person most likely to be delusional about GME and likely to subscribe to someone else's theory it was all their broker's fault really. Even the name is a nod to the delusion trading stocks is a place for poor amateurs to fleece deep-pocketed professionals and not the other way round!

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