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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

If there was anything missing from the average American’s economic wellbeing, it was the ability to create bespoke financial products to scalably make bets against informed professional traders while they sleep.

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Quite ironic. The original Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. Robinhood, the app, seems to do the exact opposite: it helps the rich get richer at the expense of regular folk.

They turned Robin Hood to Robbin’ the Hood

This was always the Robin Hood play (versus being a grown up brokerage), they are simply griftmaxxing now in a "low regulatory environment". Like Coinbase, they need volume to succeed economically, not buy and hold investors. Crypto volume is down, so Coinbase revenue is down. Young people have little to no cashflow, but they have high intent to gamble in a crushing and financially nihilistic macro, which Robin Hood serves.

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/05/nx-s1-5762276/teens-getting-h...

https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism

https://web.archive.org/web/20240226104327/https://youngmone...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240226104327/https://coinmarke...

Well, have your seen the current size of Sherwood forest

I believe you’re confusing access with outcomes. Giving people access to markets isn’t exploitation afaic.

If you’d like to make dubious trades that’s your prerogative and who am I to stop you.

You are a member of society. Society stops people doing harmful things to themselves all the time.

This should be limited to giving advice (education, warning, explicit consent), unless there's harm to third parties.

Because, you know, certain actions and even thoughts can lead to eternal damnation in Hell, according to what a society may think. Would you prefer the society to hold you off from that?

People claim this all the time to win internet arguments but the truth is we all have a moral code.

If you see a child playing with a loaded gun, you won’t stop it?

A child is not a fully autonomous person. I would of course take the loaded gun from the child, unload it, and explain its dangers to the child.

Money, in any form, may be as dangerous as a loaded gun, trading stocks or not. Most adults are careful with money, as they are with loaded guns. The problem is that some parties may try to make trading stocks (even leveraged) look much easier and safer than it is. It's like giving somebody a real loaded gun, while making it look like a toy gun, safe even for a child. And this of course needs to be regulated: not the trading, but the disclosure. This is not a toy.

Who are you to decide that a child is not a fully autonomous person? Sounds like you're imposing a normative rule based on societally derived presuppositions of right and wrong, which is exactly the point. We're just haggling over where the line should be drawn and you think it should be drawn somewhere further back than others do, but there's no truth to be found here.

Harm to others includes cost to society in general.

I have access to a car and bottle of bourbon, but there are laws that restrict me from drinking and driving.

they don't restrict you, you can always drink and drive. you may or may not, depending on your luck, suffer the legal consequences of your actions.

tell that to the cops that’ll pull you over.

ignition interlock device market continues to grow, as some states are attempting to require them in all new cars.

I disagree, AI agents could help level the playing field. Citadel doesn't have any AI models that are better than what you or I have. Market data is more accessible than ever. As LLMs get better at trading, the difference in capability between you and a professional trader gets smaller.

Also, Claude knows about a lot of the traps that consumers can fall into: spread, execution, risk concentration, etc. -- high chance that if I tell Claude I'm thinking of going all in on AMC because some Reddit post told me to, it'll say "slow down cowboy"

> it'll say "slow down cowboy"

Maybe if you prompt it to be highly critical of you, the user.

Otherwise it will absolutely right you out of money.

Could this be a good thing - yes

Will it be is a different thing though. And if it’s not, who exactly is accountable?

With funds and portfolio managers that run them, there’s a clear accountability model (if the fund sucks, the manager loses their job and the company loses credibility)

With AI agents doing the management, who is accountable when the fund sucks? If it’s the customer, we’ve moved accountability from someone who at least in theory, knows what they’re doing to someone who has little to no clue.

You have to be accountable for what you have the model do on your behalf. I hear what you're saying, but there are also issues with the hedge fund accountability model. There are certainly swaths of fund managers who are only there because they got lucky or had the right pedigree, and more that are better traders but never became a fund manager because they got unlucky or had other passions.

An individual investor can invest with their risk appetite on their time horizon and not be subject to Citadel's "5% draw down in a quarter and you're fired" culture which can be toxic to returns over time.

I believe that your individual ability to execute an order is constrained such that some of the difference is removed. On the other hand, the overall thesis has merits IMHO

What is the point of having a speculative market if everyone has access to the same information and capabilities? You might as well just direct deposit a proportional share of all economic growth relative to investment into every citizens account and be done with it.

That's kinda the point of total stock market ETFs lol

Especially because it will reduce the entropy that constrains the big guys from building a Dutch book (money pump) against the little guy.

I am sure there are some very happy people in the larger firms due to this news.

And the one time an internet meme exploded a stock they literally hid the buy button from their UI. At least they have confetti animations.

This was not due to malice but instead, incompetence. They didn’t have enough cash to clear their trades.

I have ranted on here before about the SV startup mindset of “I don’t need to know anything about the industry I’m ‘disrupting’ nor do I need to play by their rules” and this was an example of that. On that day, everybody who was actually in capital markets went, “what f-ing idiots those guys are”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze

And not just informed professional traders -- also insiders with privileged information about world events that let them trade before the news hits. Now AI agents are going to be chasing phantom signals that look like they might be evidence of an insider's move.

Even better for America's well being will be if thousands of individual investors have identical or near identical bots for sophisticated financial institutions to exploit while they sleep.

LOL. This is the outcome when a Product Manager sits there and says "You know, people just aren't losing enough money on sports betting and gambling apps. How can we fix this?"

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