aka, RH is between a rock and a hard place - either the clueless user suicides due to poor understanding, and causing bad PR, or they do what they're doing now.
I was a user when they had that suicide situation and RH did do a better job of explaining your actual balance when you entered a somewhat complex trade that caused you to have a negative balance. Still a user, who didn't know what he was doing, entered a complex trade, saw something he didn't understand and ended his life. In response Robinhood could have:
1. Made the UI "easier" to understand (i.e. lie) for 99% of situations
2. Raise the entry requirements to ensure people knew what they were doing (Gatekeep)
They chose (and continue to choose) 1, and I don't envy them - how would ever explain all the ways a margin account can put you in trouble on a 4 inch screen? Most users only care about "instant deposits" and will never get into trouble 99% of time. It took 2 "black swan" events (IIRC, the first suicide issue was during the first COVID market crash) for these issues to come to light.
They brought this onto themselves by optimizing for growth over healthy and sustainable markets.
The marketing push for options by calling it "instant trading" is pretty BS too.
And note that "borrowing money" does not imply "have margin" for people either. They might realize they're borrowing money, but not realize that has further implications they might not expect, like the broker being able to sell your stock without your approval. If they actually use the word "margin", people could at least look up what it means and likely realize it's a nontrivial topic. But just saying we'll make $X available to you makes it so much harder for them to understand there are non-obvious implications.
They specifically positioned as the “everyman trading platform”, and so even from the drawing board they knew that the majority of app users would be people with little or no experience.
All they had to do to win was to say “Hey, I know this balance looks bad, but it’s actually not the final number and here’s why”, and similarly: to be explicit about why they automatically make margin accounts, and then to again mention that when people purchase stocks.
I fielded a question from a friend who was furious that his broker wouldn't let him exercise a call yesterday ... a call that he was _short_. But he understood his position enough to understand exercising the call would be very profitable for him. Part of the reason that he thought he could excercise it was because there were notices about call exercise (presumably that it was still available for people who were already long the calls).
It's extremely hard to anticipate all the ways someone might become confused and adding additional material to resolve a potential confusion risks introducing other new and novel confusion. There is a constant trade-off and probably the only universal fix is the ready availability of competent human support, which doesn't exactly fit inside the normal "app" business model.
I think the goal of an actual "everyman trading platform" is essentially achieved by the sorts of interfaces offered on 401k accounts-- geared around not-more-than-daily trades of highly liquid securities (and if not outright curated, at least focusing on diverse relatively safe funds). What RH is doing might be marketed as an everyman trading platform but for many (most?) users it's just a casino.
> ...
> It's extremely hard to anticipate all the ways someone might become confused and adding additional material to resolve a potential confusion risks introducing other new and novel confusion.
I actually support this argument. I also concede that it’s easy to point out the information in hindsight. But I will still argue that a vital part of building a company of RH’s size and branding is about taking the time to think deeply about the customer experience. To be the experts. To distill that expertise carefully when designing each service and each app screen.
Just based on how RH potentially “sold shares out from under people”, and how the accounts are automatically margin accounts as apparently stated on some part of the user agreement; RH was specifically aware of how this would violate user expectation and they chose not to address it. It’s very difficult, I feel, for someone to argue on the basis of “well yes, of course they were margin accounts, it’s obvious to anyone who knows about how stock accounts work because <blank>” because RH was specifically designing their platform around people who don’t know how stock accounts work.
A true cash account has quite a few restrictions:
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/t...
Although it's been a long time, I spent the first decade with a trading account without margin just fine.
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/t...
Not always, see situation #3 https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-and-bulletins/ib_ca...
You need margin to engage in day-trading, but you can sell a settled stock & immediately use the funds to buy something else just fine as long as you then hold onto that purchase for 2 days.
You can’t blame people for their ignorance when you present them a fiction. If your cute little abstraction leaks then don’t do it.
If they reflected it accurately they'd be showing a negative balance until the funds arrived and some users would think they lost all their funds.
The real mistake is that they're extending margin to uninformed and unsophisticated users. ... but pointing that out just brings accusations that it's gatekeeping or limiting access to people who aren't rich.