Retail investors are RH's biggest customers. They're diminishing their risk of suits they'd likely lose/regulatory scrutiny by halting buys. The SEC will more likely hit you for allowing pumps rather than preventing them.
Trading halts are at the exchange level and stop _all_ buys and sells
What happened here is some brokers/clearing houses prevented _retail traders_ from buying, but not from selling
This is a specific broker—-one with direct financial ties to this trade, by the way—-totally shutting down the ability to enter an opening order for a specific ticker. Pretty unprecedented artificial suppression of demand.
Several did it. I heard WeBull did the same. I know I got a TastyWorks notification when they did it (and a little while ago when they turned it back on).
The more I hear, the less convinced I am that RH in particular did something nefarious.
Robinhood has no set rules, and it was impossible to predict when or if they'd halt purchasing shares. It was also not possible for Robinhood traders to know when trading of the stock would resume.
Also; Robinhood didn't halt the trading of GME, AAL, AMC, BB, and others. They just halted the purchasing of new shares. Robinhood tried limiting who could buy shares of those stocks to only the hedge funds. That would drive the stock price down, thus manipulating the stock price in the favor of Citadel / Melvin and their short positions.
Also the creation of the SEC was essentially to protect retail investors from speculative investments (that typically cleaned them out). It would be less likely to see a trade halt as going "against the people" but as a consumer protection practice, so it's doubtful it will be wagging too many fingers at RH.