Q: "Do you realize that you literally manipulated the market. Yes or No?"
Vlad: "Thank you for the great question. When I was a boy in Bulgaria [ladida]"
If he had been honest in his dealings then he wouldn't have had to evade every question posed to him.
All people who I interact with who are investing with robinhood have very little knowledge of the financial system. I hate making a generalization, but after the whole scandal it seems that robinhood investors were/are in fact not very knowledgeable about how trading works.
By being presented with learning material on how trading works, instead of trying to hide reality behind a pretty GUI? That'd be my choice.
For example on TDAmeritrade you only get a cash account by default, no margin or option trading. You can upgrade and there are multiple levels of margin upgrades in increasing steps of risk. To do an upgrade you have to at least read some material and answer some questions and check boxes. Sure you could lie through it, but at least they make it clear you're signing up for ever increasing risk at every level.
When I first read that RobinHood was allowing people margin and option trading without even telling customers that those are enabled and what it means, I always felt it can only end badly.
And it's not like they did not have other options -- they could have posted more collateral, and given that they raised billions soon after, it was within the real of possibility for them.
Money they raised later couldn't have been used as collateral until they actually raised it, even if the investors would still invest under those conditions.
Hindsight is 20/20. Prior to that event happening, was there credible evidence that an S&P 500 company was going to get pumped 10x in price by a bunch of investors coordinating on social media?
So why did you start out saying they didn't lock trading...to then say they did lock trading? Do some people will only read the first fifteen words of your post? Like are you aiming to fill the air with positive-sounding sounds that make Robinhood sound good? You think we don't think?
Sometimes contradiction is good and helps with nuance and is meaningful. Here it's just gross, like I don't even have to quote two separate parts of what you said. But since I am entitled to quoting you twice to argue with you, but need no other piece of evidence, I'll just quote that same passage again.
> robinhood didn't lock trading - or at the very least, they were far from the only brokerage to do so and had very little choice in the matter.
If they locked trading...get this...this is my logic...then it is in fact FAIR to SAY that they locked trading. It's only complex because they were cheating their customers, hence the decline of the platform, hence this chain of posts, hence the end of this sentence having spoken my piece.