There is a saying that if you're not paying for a product, you are the product.

Robinhood's real customer, the paying customer isn't the users of its app, which they offer out for free. It's actual paying customers are HFT firms, and specifically Citadel, the same Citadel that on Monday bailed out Melvin Capital with a 3 billion dollar loan.

Wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out Citadel called up Robinhood and said either shut this GME trading down or they're pulling the plug.

Melvin Capital closed out their short positions, so what exactly does Citadel stand to gain here?

I do admit to speculating here, but I am speculating that Melvin Capital did not close out their short position. Their claim to CNBC leaves a lot of room for interpretation, misunderstanding, and it's an informal statement.

We won't know what Melvin Capital did until they submit their next 13F filing.

BlackRock isn’t a hedge fund, it’s (primarily) an index provider and just holds stocks including GME on behalf of clients who invest in wide swaths of the market at once. Most of the profit has probably gone to passive investors who own a little bit of GME as part of a diversified portfolio. (I’m pretty sure that group includes me but I’m not even 100% certain of that.)

BlackRock hold everything. It doesn’t really mean anything to say that they hold a lot of shares in some particular company. You might as well have just written “GameStop is a publicly traded US company” and one would deduce that BlackRock owns a lot of shares in it.

BlackRock had 13% of GameStop. That's more consistent with taking a real stake than just happening to own it along with a piece of everything else.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blackrock-investment-game...

BlackRock owns a similar % of the entire market, so this isn't too surprising. BlackRock has about $9 trillion AUM, and the global stock market is worth around $100 trillion. (Not all of that $9 trillion is stocks, but BlackRock still owns a notable percentage of the total stock market.)

Linkedin is your friend. A lot of top people came from Blackrock. lol.

not having a RH account, can you trade there on leverage? I imagine if a huge number of retail traders are ending up leveraged to high hell, RH may have ended up in an uncanny financial position because of this.

You can (and people frequently do) trade options on RH, which are inherently leveraged. But RH is just a broker - it’s not on the other side of the trades itself.

ah okay. I wasn't sure what services RH offered and didn't. The amount of meme-ery around them had me wondering if they had decided to go beyond being a broker to try and extract more money from users like they do by selling access to their order flow.

I think the biggest thing RH offered that they may have been justified in curtailing is fractional stock buys and buys on margin. But to stop trading on buys outright is very strange.

Then they can enact a moritorium on leverage buys to protect themselves. They have no liability for clients who are buying without leverage.