I mean, pragmatically speaking a buyer should be more wary of a situation like this. But motor oil is not the same thing as brokerages. It is very common for trades to be executed with no fee these days. It’s a market norm.
It is not a market norm at AutoZone to have $5 quarts of oil sitting next to free quarts of oil.
Add in any case, ethically speaking, it is still the fault of whoever mislabeled that olive oil.
I'm an outsider, but that's how this appears to me. They weren't lied to, they misjudged—and mainly because of a lack of understanding.
Traditionally, acting without understanding but still a high degree of confidence was called hubris.
And it appears the institutional traders expressed hubris when they over-leveraged, and this subset of retail investors expressed hubris when they didn't properly understand the capabilities and limitations of the app they decided to use to engage with the stock market.
I haven't seen people on other platforms complain in the same ways. I mean, for instance I haven't been restricted on my platform. I haven't heard anything about Questrade or E-Trade or anything.
To go back to my contrived motor analogies, it looks like a lot of people also expected a lawnmower to compete with a Tercel, never mind a Ferrari.
RH's decision here isn't an inherent limitation of their platform. It's an active decision they made. One they did not have to.
Also, what RH has done isn't harming just their own customers, but the entire market. People using Questrade or E-trade are finding that they have fewer buyers for their shares. If RH is going to act like a Tercel on the racetrack, they have no business entering the race in the first place. They're a danger to the other participants.
(BTW, analogies are fun. Thanks for the opportunity to torture them like this :)
If Robinhood (et al—sorry RH you're the de facto stand-in now) can't meet the standard of keeping up with the ... other cars in the race... then they shouldn't be allowed to enter. In that case, the analogy helps since most races have minimum qualifier rounds before you're allowed to enter.
I've got no arguments there. But that's the kind of thing RH [et al] were founded to confront or change, wasn't it? Or were they just circumventing previous regulation about market interfaces? This is where we get into the weeds and me out of my depth.
In the case of Robinhood, I can't just liquidate my money out of Robinhood and move it into a new platform and buy GME today if I wanted. I had a reasonable expectation that I'd be able to do this yesterday, and now that expectation was subverted in a way that's costly/inconvenient to me even if the service is free I have every right to complain.
If someone gave you that oil under fraudulent pretenses then it would absolutely be their fault..
Now to say that Robinhood is engaging in outright fraud, but having your service expectations subverted like this is going to rightfully piss people off whether or not the underlying service is free. There's all sorts of malfeasance that Robinhood could engage in with its free service that would clearly be unethical/illegal.