It's also hard to believe that their margin based algorithm doesn't have parameters that can be tuned easily. It's not the first time that a single stock has crazy volatility and speculation.

A financial institution didn't foresee a black swan financial event? Color me shocked.

If I'm reading the Twitter thread right, what killed Robinhood was the component of ">30% of your flow is in one stock", which is something that I could absolutely see never having happened to Robinhood until now.

If you want to side with current customers, another easy fix is to disallow new customers (if they cannot allow auto-margin for new customers.) How hard a change would it be to disable new account creation...at worst commenting out /customer/new on the route file for a day until they can fix the actual problem?

To be perfectly honest, given the way that narrative of the entire debacle has been built up to "hoi polloi stick it to the evil financial gurus", I don't think there is anything Robinhood could have done that wouldn't have immediately been spun as "THEY'RE TRYING TO BAIL OUT THE HEDGE FUNDS!"

> Also, it’s not realistic to expect them to completely retool their entire app and infrastructure in a matter of hours to disallow margin-based trades of only certain securities.

They do have the ability to change the margin requirements for a particular stock, as well as disable “instant deposits”. They don’t let you withdrawal money until it’s cleared so adding the ability to hold the funds in the account until they clear wouldn’t be hard if it’s not already there.