Robinhood literally killed a kid

noyourewrong wrote: This kind of stuff is exactly why there need to be limits on what novices are allowed to do on trading apps.

That's part of the problem and part of the lawsuit. The app asks you how much trading experience you have. If you say "not much" then the app says congrats you can now buy and sell options.

The app also provides benefits the more you trade on it. Everything on the app is meant to convince you to trade as much as possible. It treats it like a game.

So the app not only takes advantage of your inexperience, but it encourages you to trade as much as you can. It's 100% irresponsible. It's not democratizing wall street, it's democratizing bankruptcy.

yeah more of Robin The Hood, than Robinhood.

While I do not think they should have to pay $1 towards this idiot's death, I do think the story should receive attention to the "game-ization" of stock trading.

The app makes one feel like they are playing any other video game, only this game has real life consequences. Some of those are that you could make a lot of money, the other is that you can also lose a tremendous amount of money.

He went in know the risks and rewards. He was a 20 year old man fully able to make his own good and bad decisions. His just just a cautionary tale.

Precious Roy wrote:

So, when you think you have some hot tip from reddit or youtube and go long of short or whatever, the giant hedge funds are immediately alerted to the activity and are able to use their size to get on the opposite side of your bet and win.

Roy... come on. You are smart enough to know that they don't need this information in 2021. All they do is use their HFT microwave towers to beat the trades. Not just the little guy, but even their competitors. The HFT firms skim a regular joe's trade 100 times while it slowly make's its way to the exchange.

applied economics wrote:

Of course simply making Robinhood charge clients on honest commission is not the only answer.

Why should I have to pay a commission to buy and hold a blue chip? What are you protecting ME from?

Not the idiots trying to get rich quick on fancy schemes, what's your excuse for making the rest of us pay? What's the intrinsic value in this service to justify the commission? Otherwise the regulation is only a means letting the broker rip off everyone, not just the dumb people.

He literally killed himself. He shouldn't have been using Robinhood if he didn't know what he was doing. If anything besides himself killed him, it was his ignorance that killed him.

The whole derivatives market is evil. It contributes nothing to the well being of mankind. It's right up there with crypto.

This makes Robinhood culpable, in my opinion.

But after Robinhood sent him a late-night email requesting he pay more than $170,000, no one at the company was available to answer his questions.

I can't imagine a civil court jury looking at the $730,000 notice and then this email AND the lack of any customer service followup and not coming to the conclusion that Robinhood was negligent. Plus, the optics of a court trial would devastate Robinhood. The company might not survive.

They will settle out of court. We won't know the amount, but it will likely be far into the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.

As case in point, I had a $60,000 error in my Schwab account back in December. I called customer service and resolved it in about a half-hour. That's what customer service should do when a client sees a mistake on his or her account.

When a fool jumps into deep water and can’t swim then gets eaten by sharks it’s not the sharks fault. It’s not the water’s fault.

It’s the fool’s fault.

It is no different than if a moran takes a loan from a loan shark and can’t pay it back. There is no way to prevent stupid people from doing stupid things.

stop it please wrote:

comeon wrote:

Very sad story overall, but blaming Robinhood for his death, or saying that they *literally* killed him is wrong.

If you read the article it's very clear robinhood is 100% responsible for his death. They told him he owed 750k and that he needed to pay 170k immediately. He only had 16k in his account. Turns out those messages were wrong and he owed nothing, but he wasn't sent that message until after he died.

Robinhood has also been exposed as a tool to make wall street and hedge funds richer. They are actually not looking out for the little guy like they claim.

This lawsuit will put them out of business and even some executives in jail.

So if you ever want to kill someone send them a message that they owe you 170k. It's basically murder. Literally.

It is a tragic story but you can't blame the hammer when an idiot swings it wrong.