A broker is just a service. As it turns out a low-cost/free service provides an inferior service to high-cost prime brokers.

You get what you pay for. That’s not a scandal. It’s common sense. It’d be like me complaining that it’s no fair that Google can afford better infrastructure than my startup search engine.

Day trading is not a human right. Anybody who wants trading infrastructure like Citadel is free to go out and spend the same hundreds of millions it took Citadel to build that infrastructure.

I don't think that's quite accurate either. It's not that RH's service is terrible, it's they had to cut trades to meet regulatory obligations. But, by only cutting trades in one direction. And that happened to be in the direction that favors their largest customer. And that customer also happens to be on the hook for much of the short squeeze... The optics are TERRIBLE.

They didn’t cut trades in one direction. They closed new positions in both directions. Buys were still allowed to close short positions, just the same as sells were allowed to close long positions.

Thanks for the clarification, I saw similar comments and assumed they were true.

Regardless, that doesn't change the optics to an outsider - the rich guys (hedge funds) get to stop their losses, potentially screwing the little guy.

That might be true if government and big finance weren’t so intertwined. A lot of these big players are propped up by endless QE, which will eventually hit normal people in the form of inflation and taxes.

> Anybody who wants trading infrastructure like Citadel is free to go out and spend the same hundreds of millions it took Citadel to build that infrastructure.

Well, no. Most people don't have that. "The rich get richer".

I believe throwawaysea's point is that the one thing has nothing to do with the other. Essentially, the bank weighing in saying "We don't believe your customers are good for this amount of money you claim they are good for." is, at heart, just financial prudence on the part of a trade's 3rd party backer. The other is criminal collusion on the part of people on the other side of a trade. But the 3rd party backer doesn't care about any of that as horrible as it may sound. They just want to be sure they can get their money from both sides, and they're not at all sure about that with these GME/BBY/AMC et al trades.

I get that, but the financial links between the players here doesn't look good, even if it's all legal.

Citadel bailed out Melvin. Citadel is RH's biggest customer. RH chops off the retail traders, but only in the direction that favors Citadel (and Melvin).

Was RH just ensuring they comply with regulations? Probably. Does it look like RH is doing Citadel a solid at the expense of their users? Absolutely.