20yo Robinhood Customer Commits Suicide After Seeing $730K Negative Balance

Re:20yo Robinhood Customer Commits Suicide After Seeing $730... by superfrank on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @03:08PM (#23555424)

Options are already broken into levels 1-4 (this is an industry thing, not just RH). Levels 1 and 2 don't run the risk of this happening since you can only sell to close. On other platforms that I've used, going from levels 2 to 3 took a while and required some verification steps to try to confirm that I knew what I was doing.

Robinhood already asks for information about your net-worth, income, etc. The problem is that they verify nothing (at least in my experience). I read /r/wallstreetbets all the time, and plenty of 18 year olds say they are making 100k+ and RH just approves them. They need to improve that process.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:20yo Robinhood Customer Commits Suicide After Seeing $730... by GregMartinez on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @03:30PM (#23555670)

Just checked and you don't even need to say you're making 100k+.

I marked that my liquid assets are under 25k, net worth is under 25k, and yearly income is under 25k (all the lowest you can select) and they approved me for option trading instantly.

Looking at GOOG the UI shows me put where the max loss is $8.5k. Seems reckless if they really use the information I gave them to determine what level of risk is appropriate.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:20yo Robinhood Customer Commits Suicide After Seeing $730... by tonytuttle on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @06:57PM (#23557812)

I just want to point out that at level 1 you can sell to open covered calls.

[ Parent | on HN ]