Retail investors could still invest using regular tools. Most banks have portals where you can buy/sell, but most of them safeguard against margin bets and they have much less sketchy practices.
Robinhood made it fancy and hid the complexities of investing so they could turn investing into a gambling platform.
Re:Robinhood S-1 IPO
by toomanybeersies on Friday July 02, 2021 @09:30AM
(#27711253)
There's a reason why retail investors have traditionally been locked out of things like options and investing in IPOs. More often than not it ends up with the less wealthy losing their life savings.
"The wrong hands" is the average retail investor. The philosophical debate is whether those people should be allowed to waste their life savings because they should know better, or if the government should make efforts to ensure that they can't.
Obviously while I see the above as a lot of great things, in the wrong hands people can do a ton of damage to themselves with margin, options or trading risky stocks. Robinhood, at the demands of critics, has been improving their information in their UI to help people better understand the risks. And yes, their bash the button to get early crypto access shall never be forgotten & always be a tarnish.
The Robinhood app is far better than anyone else out there for your average investor. ThinkorSwim is the only thing even close & it's far to complicated for most. Otherwise Robinhood is faster, cheaper, better info & overall better user experience. The other companies have all been incredibly behind times, as financial companies are known for.
Side Rant: Robinhood wasn't the only one to run into GameStop issues. There are some people who believe the whole GME debacle was very close to having huge negative implications on the entire market that were going to hurt everyone, whether in the trade or not.