Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood.android&showAllReviews=true

by sschueller • 5 years ago

1177 498 5 years ago

play.google.com

mycentstoo2• 5 years ago

Still 4.8 on the App Store though

muleroid• 5 years ago

I believe App Store updates a day later, so we're likely not seeing the results of any mass rating bombs.

mycentstoo2• 5 years ago

Ah that makes sense. I wasn't aware of that.

mrtksn• 5 years ago

Not exactly a day later but the ratings tend to come with 6 to 12 hours delay. Sometimes more.

Also, there's this strange thing that some of the ratings disappear and come back later or not.

prophesi• 5 years ago

It can also take a while for a rating to go through. Once you tap the allotted stars you'd like to rate an app, you need to wait until you see the "Your feedback was submitted" modal to appear.

ArtTimeInvestor• 5 years ago

Just as I was wondering how many retail investors might be involved:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947674

From the number of Playstore votes it seems quite a few?

Will be interesting to see if it stays that way. Or if they can somehow cheat their way out of it and get all recent ratings deleted or something.

Any guesses?

MPSimmons• 5 years ago

If they keep selling people's stocks without their consent, then yeah, I'm pretty sure it'll stay until RH can buy better reviews.

[edit]

though there are some reports that the stocks were bought on margin, which makes it more(?) okay, I guess?

fennecfoxen• 5 years ago

though there are some reports that the stocks were bought on margin, which makes it more(?) okay, I guess?

https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHS%20Custo...

4. Liquidation. In the event of the death of the Customer, or in the event the margin in any account in which the Customer has an interest shall in either Robinhood’s or the Introducing Broker’s discretion become unsatisfactory to either Robinhood or the Introducing Broker, or be deemed insufficient by either Robinhood or the Introducing Broker, Robinhood is hereby authorized; (a) to sell any or all securities or other property which Robinhood may hold for the Customer (either individually or jointly with others); (b) to buy any or all securities and other property which may be short in such accounts; and/or (c) to cancel any open orders and to close any or all outstanding contracts; all without demand for margin or additional margin, notice of sale or purchase, or other notice or advertisement, and that any prior demand or notice shall not be a waiver of its rights provided herein.

(emphasis added, and if you like that there's an arbitration agreement too.)

https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHS%20Margi...

WE CAN SELL YOUR SECURITIES OR OTHER ASSETS WITHOUT CONTACTING YOU. Some investors mistakenly believe that their brokerage firm must contact them for a margin call to be valid, and that their firm cannot liquidate securities or other assets in their accounts to meet the call unless the firm has contacted them first. This is not the case. Although we may attempt to notify you of margin calls, we are not required to do so. However, even if we have contacted you and provided a specific date to meet a margin call, we can still take necessary steps to protect our financial interests, including immediately selling the securities without notice to you. We may forcibly liquidate all or part of your account without prior notice, regardless of your intent to satisfy a margin call, in order to protect your interests or our interests.

YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO CHOOSE WHICH SECURITIES OR OTHER ASSETS IN YOUR ACCOUNT(S) ARE LIQUIDATED OR SOLD TO MEET A MARGIN CALL. Because the securities are collateral for the margin loan, we have the right to decide which security to sell in order to protect our interests.

WE CAN INCREASE “HOUSE” MAINTENANCE MARGIN REQUIREMENTS AT ANY TIME AND ARE NOT REQUIRED TO PROVIDE YOU ADVANCE WRITTEN NOTICE. These changes in policy often take effect immediately and may result in the issuance of a maintenance margin call. Your failure to satisfy the call may require us to liquidate or sell securities in your account(s).

SpicyLemonZest• 5 years ago

e: I'm leaving my original comment below for posterity, but I learned upthread that I was substantially misinformed here. Robinhood accounts are by default margin accounts, and their documentation describes this in an incredibly misleading way (https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/robinhood-accou...):

When you sign up for a new account, you’ll automatically start with a Robinhood Instant account, which is a margin account. This means you’ll have access to instant deposits and extended-hours trading. You also won’t have to wait for your funds to process when you sell stocks or make a deposit (up to $1,000).

I stand by my claim that margin accounts necessarily require forced liquidation, but this is pretty indefensible.

-----

If the stocks were bought on margin it's entirely non-objectionable. Forced liquidation is a well-known practice that's fundamental to margin accounts as a concept - without it, a margin account is just an unsecured loan, and nobody's going to offer the average margin trader a low-cost unsecured loan for stock speculation.

adrr2• 5 years ago

Margin accounts have capital requirements. If you’re over leveraged, they will liquidate your positions to ensure you have capital. This is standard. If people didn’t know about this, they have no business with a margin account.

beagle32• 5 years ago

The sells were appropriate if bought on margin (once the share price took a dive). The thing is, RobinHood refused “buy” order that were completely inline with the margin requirements, and that caused the share price to dive.

Seems to be a coordinated move among all retail browsers (including IB according to people on this discussion - despite publicly claiming they are just hiking margins).

Basically, as of this morning, retail clients could only sell, whereas institutional clients could buy and sell as they wish.

Doesn’t sound remotely ok. In fact, sounds completely entirely not ok, and likely illegal (but I am not a lawyer)

forbiddenvoid3• 5 years ago

It turns out that Robinhood accounts are margin by default, which is not really standard practice. I couldn't prove that this behavior (closing held positions without consent) was intended with that design, but it does feel pretty gnarly.

rohan1024• 5 years ago

This has happened in India previously with TikTok. Google removed the reviews to improve rating but in this case I think Google won't take any action.

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/google-remov...

tinyhouse2• 5 years ago

My guess is that Google will get involved. It's not the first time a mob is trying to destroy the rating of an app. But their rating before all of this drama is not going to last; that's for sure.

slenk• 5 years ago

But the app is broken. They are not allowing you to buy shares. Why should an app that decides you can't buy certain shares, and they auto-sells some shares you own, be rated highly?

vkou3• 5 years ago

A stock trading app that encourages you to trade options, and then randomly(?) closes your positions should not only have a 1 star review, it should not be allowed to operate.

Actually, given that RH is currently only allowing people to sell their positions, and not buy into them, the only correct step is for the app stores to only allow RH to be uninstalled, and to block any new installations. All for the financial well-being of their users, of course.

Miner49er3• 5 years ago

It's honest reviews though? I had a 5 star rating on the app and loved it. After what they've done today, I am switching brokers, and changed my review to 1 star. I would honestly no longer recommend Robinhood to anyone.

guerrilla• 5 years ago

By mob you mean the users who are justifiably upset the app is not working as expected by not allowing them to buy and forcing sales without user permission.

josephorjoe• 5 years ago

It would seem Google should remove the app from the store since it does not do what it claims to do.

An app claiming to be a stock trading app that doesn't allow trades for a NASDAQ listed stock isn't really a stock trading app.

psychlops• 5 years ago

Only approved messages are now allowed on the large platforms. I predict they will "correct" the error.

SCHiM• 5 years ago

Funny how that works. An algorithm, a computer, can ban your entire virtual presence at a whim, with no recourse. (talking about Google obviously).

But the opinions of incensed humans aren't worth the rollback it takes to "correct" the problem.

The entirety of google is a money making machine intelligence serving it's few wealthy owners, and absolutely disrupting and destroying everything else.

We need to take the torch to our big tech overlords.

mattnewton• 5 years ago

I have no idea where this figure came from but Motherboard tweeted it was somewhere near half robinhood's users (had holdings in GME)

https://mobile.twitter.com/motherboard/status/13547982444553...

boatsie• 5 years ago

Google will moderate/filter out the reviews. And then maybe the mob will go after Google and we will really see if David can harm Goliath.

pgt• 5 years ago

I believe David can. If there is one industry in which a challenger can overthrow the incumbent, it is software.

wonderwonder2• 5 years ago

Optimally the result is Robin Hood is removed from the play and apple store for willfully defrauding their customers. Very real damages were suffered as a result of their willful actions. There was no warning and there was no way they did not know harm would come. Also if no retail traders could buy, who was buying the shares that they were forced to sell? If it was the short hedge funds, that has got to be a criminal conspiracy level charge.

mantap2• 5 years ago

It's a bubble. Bubbles pop. Robinhood's argument would be that they prevented harm to investors by preventing them from putting money into a bubble that was going to pop anyway. As soon as this hit the news you got all kinds of regular people wanting to get in on the action, not connected to WSB.

notjustanymike• 5 years ago

Well earned.

newfeatureok• 5 years ago

I wonder what percentage of Robinhood users hold GME - if it's more than 25% I'd say they're finished. If we assume 25% of users hold GME and 80% of GME holders will not return after this fiasco that's extremely significant IMO.

Not to say that they'll cease to exist, but I doubt they'll remain the "#1 trading platform."

jzoch• 5 years ago

half of all americans invested in the market own some GME allegedly

sitzkrieg2• 5 years ago

in an etf or fund, maybe

sschueller2• 5 years ago

Didn't they want to expand to Europe sometime soon? I guess that is up in the air now after the regulators see this.

spikels• 5 years ago

Can’t find the link but I think I read earlier today it was much higher than 25%.

Miner49er3• 5 years ago

According to Motherboard it's more than half.

https://twitter.com/motherboard/status/1354798244455395328

EDIT: This is untrue, please refer to jaywalk's reply.

im3w1l• 5 years ago

Can this really be true? It sounds so implausible that I'm not sure if I can take their tweeted word for it.

mafuyu• 5 years ago

I think GME is one of the freebie stocks that Robinhood gives out as a referral bonus, so many of those users might just have had one stock incidentally.

reducesuffering• 5 years ago

I can say with 99% certainty that they aren't just counting invidual $GME holders, but every one of Robinhood users that holds an ETF (like total US Market) that contains $GME...

So this is really such a bad faith statement from Motherboard, because all of the ETF holders (probably 90% of the "half") can still sell their ETF's and thus their indirect $GME shares...

jaywalk• 5 years ago

Although they've left the tweet up, the article it links to says that this is incorrect: "Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that 56 percent of Robinhood users hold GME stock. This is incorrect, based on a misreading of a statistic on Robinhood. Motherboard regrets the error."

noitpmeder• 5 years ago

From what I understand Robinhood's actions today only impacted derivatives of GME, not trades involving the actual underlying equity (which, I imagine, is what most people actually own).

sschueller2• 5 years ago

Sort by newest ratings to see why.

sneak• 5 years ago

Can someone who knows more about such things than I explain to me why their weird response to the situation (halting buying, but still permitting selling) was deemed by them to be the best of their options (the other two obvious ones being to temporarily stop dealing in those securities entirely (halting buying and selling), or to continue letting people trade them as they had the previous day)?

It's confusing to me. I'd think if they were being risk-averse or something they'd have stopped dealing in them entirely until the craziness passed. The "you can only sell, not buy" part seems... odd to me.

Pasorrijer2• 5 years ago

In the simplest, likely potentially inaccurate explanation... Robinhood doesn't actually make the trades. They pay someone else to make the trades, add a small amount to the price, and that's how they get to 0$ trading price to the end user. The upstream party is refusing to do things, so Robinhood has no choice but to follow the rules that party set.

That's like, way over simplified but gets to the gist

[Edit cause spelling are hard]

outoftheabyss• 5 years ago

Then why not communicate that in a diplomatic way. Their business and user base is at stake

a_t48• 5 years ago

Halting buying and selling is even worst - it means that people are locked into owning GME even if it tanks to 0.

(someone please correct if wrong)

Edit: I know they haven't halted selling, this is directly in response to a part of the parent's comment

stuff4ben• 5 years ago

They just halted buying and are still allowing closing out of your position.

stickfigure• 5 years ago

You mean people who bought a hot potato might be stuck owning it when the music stops? Make no mistake, the music will stop and someone will be left holding it. Might as well be the folks holding it right now.

Mtinie4• 5 years ago

Buying was halted. Held shares can still be sold, if you so chose.

That’s what I’m seeing in RH when I look at the small amount of Blackberry (BB) shared I own.

ransom1538• 5 years ago

Citadel is a hedge fund that owns Melvin Capital Management.

Melvin is a $GME short seller predicted to lose BILLIONS due to the people taking the free market back.

Citadel owns the app Robinhood.

Citadel banned purchases of new $GME shares on RH.

Market manipulation.

https://twitter.com/shane_riordan/status/1354786445668610049

^ quoted from here

Ooops their correction here:

https://twitter.com/shane_riordan/status/1354787975058616320

beervirus• 5 years ago

Citadel doesn't own Robinhood.

Sohcahtoa824• 5 years ago

You should probably include the correction Shane made later:

https://twitter.com/shane_riordan/status/1354787975058616320

"Citadel isn’t a majority owner of RH, but they DO pay RH a hefty figure to the app for consumer data. On top of the money paid to bail out Melvin.

All they have to do is threaten to pull that money for data from RH and RH pulls new share purchases of $GME.

It’s wild."

dj_mc_merlin3• 5 years ago

I really don't think you'll get a good answer from anyone for a couple of days at least. This is quite unprecedented (not them halting buying of a certain stock, but the whole situation with its underlying context).

rapsey• 5 years ago

Robinhood owners are the ones bleeding money from GME.

metalliqaz• 5 years ago

It is very likely that their "upstream" partners asserted this, and Robinhood didn't have much of a choice. Their biggest mistake is probably the god-awful communication with customers about this decision.

sgpl• 5 years ago

Another thing to note is that one of Robinhood's main investors from their last round, 'D1 Capital', is also down 20% this year [1] with a fund size of 20 billion, so that's a 4 billion dollar hole for them to recover from.

I've only seen mention of Citadel but the short squeeze on these stocks (blocked stocks) continuing could literally have made D1 Capital explode.

In the aftermath of this fiasco, perhaps Robinhood can get away with a small fine. Even a billion would be less than the collective sum all hedge funds involved could have lost had this upward price movement continued.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-28/dan-sundh...

bszupnick• 5 years ago

My understanding is that Robinhood didn't actually block these purchases but rather the service they use to buy/sell stocks blocked it called Citadel

So it's not Robinhood, persay, but rather Citadel.

Why did Citadel block purchasing of GME stock? Because Citadel just invested 2 billion dollars in Melvin Capital Management; one of the hedge funds that has a lot to lose as long as the GME stocks keep going up.

QuesnayJr3• 5 years ago

I think this is possible, but do we know for a fact this is the case? Melvin claims they already got out of the GME trade. They could be lying, but they would open themselves to a lawsuit from investors if they were.

I'm not sure if Citadel can just refuse to purchase GME (RH could just go elsewhere), but maybe they said they wouldn't pay RH anymore for order flow unless they blocked it. But do we know that Citadel did this? I've only heard speculation to that effect.

TaupeRanger• 5 years ago

That's the rumor but there's no evidence to back it up. Melvin could've closed their GME positions days ago, in which case Citadel wouldn't be on the hook for any further price changes.

ffggvv• 5 years ago

citadel only handles like 10% of their order flow. the rest is other companies. including Apex clearing which also handles it for Webull and other platforms that halted trading

librish• 5 years ago

Preventing people from exiting an existing position is a much bigger deal than preventing them from entering a new one.

Mtinie4• 5 years ago

You can still close any positions you have open, as of 3 PM Eastern.

xxpor3• 5 years ago

I'm surprised the app stores (well, at least the play store) don't have hysteresis built in to prevent mobbing the ratings, just in general.

cromka• 5 years ago

Why would they? They just need spam protection. If legitimate, independent users vote them down in thousands then why would an app need a protection?

ckastner4• 5 years ago

What would be something positive about allowing mobbing?

remram• 5 years ago

Steam (video game store) has separate "reviews" and "recent reviews" summaries, so you will see something like "reviews: mostly positive, recent reviews: overwhelmingly negative". It is often informative, as updates can make a good game unplayable, riddle it with microtransaction, or servers can go offline.

dylan604• 5 years ago

If a dev releases an update that breaks the app or fundamentally alters the behavior of the app, why should users not be allowed to offer an updated rating based on those changes. If ratings are due to some recent change, then of course it will naturally look like a swarm. Nothing nefarious about it. Any kind of artificial disruption of the users being allowed to post their review is artificially protecting the dev.

boojing• 5 years ago

Steam (the video game distribution platform) does "recent reviews" and "all reviews" so that you can tell if there has been a recent influx of positive or negative reviews.

dheera• 5 years ago

This is not mobbing the ratings. They did something bad, and they are getting bad reviews for it. The review system is working as intended.

xxpor3• 5 years ago

I don't have a problem with this specific case, I'm thinking of, for example, users of 2 different apps having a war with each other and going in and leaving negative reviews for the other app.

SixDouble5321• 5 years ago

Considering the rating is back to normal, I'd say it was protected.

fireeyed2• 5 years ago

There should be zero stars available for scamsters. Seriously this should be an option. Why should anyone give one star to a scamming firm Robbing Hood which has colluded with their backer Citadel. They have derogatory term for Retail Investors - Dumb Money. Now the 'Dumb Money' has figured out the the hedge funds'rigged game.

afavour4• 5 years ago

Now the 'Dumb Money' has figured out the the hedge funds'rigged game.

After everyone threw a ton of money into the market the hedge funds control. “Dumb money” doesn’t feel like an inappropriate nickname.

nostromo• 5 years ago

This is a pet peeve of mine about star ratings.

Visually, allowing 1 to 5 stars inflates the way ratings look, because the first star is always present, even for the worst products.

Imagine if it was pie chart or a bar chart: the lowest rating would look like 20%, not 0%.

Or imagine a product where 50% of people gave it the lowest rating (1 star) and the rest gave it the highest rating (5 stars). This would be presented as a 3/5 star item, which visually appears quite a bit better than its real rating (50%).

TeMPOraL2• 5 years ago

That's a consequence of the UI pattern - when you use the same widget as indicator and input, you need some way to represent "no vote yet" - plus, it would be hard to click/tap "no stars". It could be done better but alas, minimalism is the name of the game.

amelius2• 5 years ago

Yeah but if I see 0 stars the result is that I'm assuming that there were no votes.

ttymck2• 5 years ago

Why can you not normalize the scale to 0-4 stars?

dang5• 5 years ago

Could you please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules when posting here? They include:

"Please don't fulminate."

That means please don't post comments in which indignation overwhelms information. That lowers signal/noise and escalates activation in others, which takes us away from curious conversation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

anm892• 5 years ago

When retail in traders en masse decide that a trading platform is impinging upon their rights, the SEC should be obligated to open an investigation. Isn't this pretty much a major component of their intended purpose?

alangibson8• 5 years ago

The SEC has led the charge of government agencies away from anything that could reasonably be called regulation. Take note of how often the term 'oversight' is used vs 'regulation' when these guys are talking.

ethbr02• 5 years ago

Last I checked, the SEC doesn't pay very well compared to financial law / trading...

anm892• 5 years ago

Yeah, I assume in reality, this is essentially the exact opposite what is happening. I would imagine the SEC is involved behind the scenes in coordinating these shutdowns.

That feels like a huge violation of their stated intent though.

totalZero2• 5 years ago

how often the term 'oversight' is used vs 'regulation' when these guys are talking.

Is that how we're determining efficacy now...? Semantics?

I take it that you like FINRA because of the R in the name.

dmurray• 5 years ago

I think we can be certain the SEC will open an investigation. They don't generally work in real time though.

ritchiea• 5 years ago

I've been reading WSB since yesterday and while I understand the outrage about blocking trading. They started blocking trading with $GME trading in the $400's, and a slew of redditors on WSB, Discord & Telegram pushing penny stocks. It started out a crusade against the hedge fund shorting $GME and quickly turned into rallying dumb money to pump and dump penny stocks. Looking at the direction things were going it seems like Robinhood acted responsibly in cutting off the buys of AMC, BB, NOK, etc. They're all stocks that have been propped up artificially in the last 48 hours based on the hype and attention generated by the Gamestop story.

No one serious thinks Gamestop stock is worth $400+. Robinhood cut off buying at the point when unsophisticated investors were caught up in a stampede to "stick it to the man." Seems like they did the right thing.

nightowl_games• 5 years ago

Robinhood acted responsibly

No. This is against the Free Market hypothesis. We are supposed to let the Dumb Money get into the market, fail out and learn their lesson.

adoxyz• 5 years ago

Should Robinhood be an arbiter of what is a reasonable trade and what people can spend their money on? Because if so, they have a lot of restricting to do to keep people safe...

snarf21• 5 years ago

What about the people that are trying to double down to protect their long position? What about the money they will lose? Either the market is efficient or it isn't.

s_dev• 5 years ago

"This is Wall-street Dr. Burry, if you offer us free money, we're going to take it"

Absolute nonsense. The exchange is protecting the trader from himself!!

The exchange is designed to make money selling and buying. There is no reason they would stop either unless some big wig made a phone call.

shrimpx4• 5 years ago

I have a bit of knowledge from friends who work in fintech, and the sentiment among fintech companies seems to be that SEC doesn't matter. The fine is small and comes way too late. You can simply account for an approximate future fine and move forward with your shady business.

silexia6• 5 years ago

This will probably be my least popular post ever, but the explanation needs to get out there for why Robinhood stopped trading on GME.

Selling a stock short is NOT illegal. It is a perfectly valid type of investment according to the SEC:

“D. Are short sales legal? Although the vast majority of short sales are legal, abusive short sale practices are illegal. For example, it is prohibited for any person to engage in a series of transactions in order to create actual or apparent active trading in a security or to depress the price of a security for the purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of the security by others. Thus, short sales effected to manipulate the price of a stock are prohibited.”

Basically – you can’t short sell a stock to manipulate the price down so you can buy a lot more of it later. If you believe a stock is overpriced and short sell it, that is legal. That is exactly what tons of retail traders and hedge funds do every day, including on Gamestop.

On the other hand, manipulating a stock price upwards to cause a short squeeze IS illegal according to the same SEC article:

“Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal.”

Unprecedented numbers of people on Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere collaborated to intentionally create a short squeeze on GME in the last week. No one talked about a fundamental case why Gamestop the company was worth a lot of money and would be successful in the future; instead everyone made the argument that due to a very high short interest of 100%+, that a short squeeze would send the price “to the moon”. That is illegal according to the SEC.

Multiple brokerages, especially Robinhood, probably had their attorneys tell them that “Hey, you are aiding and abetting illegal activity by enabling a short squeeze and could be liable criminally or civilly if you continue to allow this blatant illegal activity on your platform”. So they decided to stop it by only allowing people to close their positions rather than open new ones in support of the short squeeze.

Another strong reason is that if the short squeeze caused the GME stock to go to 5000 in a sudden leap, tons of traders (both retail and professional) could instantly go broke, and then the brokerage (Robinhood) would be left holding the bag. For example, picture a retail investor with a Robinhood account had sold call options in the amount of $100,000 and their account was worth $200,000. If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000. Now multiply that by thousands of accounts…. no brokerage wants to take the risk of being bankrupted, so they shut it down.

The two strong reasons Robinhood and other brokers stopped trading was to prevent legal liability from enabling illegal activity on their platform, and for wanting to avoid potentially massive banktuptcy from traders unable to cover their losses.

racl101• 5 years ago

Isn't this pretty much a major component of their intended purpose?

Reminds me of the scene in the The Big Short where the hot chick in the pool who currently works for the SEC (at the time) is in town in Vegas for a conference hoping to run into some Wall Street banker dudes so she can schmooze and float her resume to them. And it's not a conflict of interest.

grezql• 5 years ago

when such unjust is done to the mass, this may just spill over to violence. If I were RH/Melvin/Citadel, I'd watch over my shoulders.

SEC needs to intervene quick

brador• 5 years ago

Could we see a class action? Is there a case?

moolcool2• 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1354839676482367488

jandrese• 5 years ago

The class action has already been filed against Robinhood. It remains to be seen if it gets any traction.

elliekelly• 5 years ago

It won't. Everyone who has an account at RH has contractually agreed not to bring or participate in a class action suit and has contractually agreed to arbitration.

jcranmer• 5 years ago

The case appears to be filed here: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/50143052/nelson-v-robin...

Scanning the complaint quickly... it's not a strong case. The problem plaintiffs have is that the contract they signed lets Robinhood essentially refuse to trade if it wants to. In order to defeat that, you're going to have to argue that those contract provisions violate federal law and are therefore unenforceable. That's not really want the complaint does. Instead, it seems to argue that Robinhood's error was in failing to allow trades in GME in the first place, not in the reasoning for its failings. (At least they actually allege enough of this to potentially get discovery, which is better than some other complaints I've seen recently).

jb7753• 5 years ago

Serious question: Since RobinHood is a private company, does the "if you don't like it, you can build your own platform" argument apply here? Or does that only apply selectively when it benefits partisan politics?

This is the natural evolution when censorship as we've recently seen is given a pass.

Layke11233• 5 years ago

I believe this is different because the SEC is involved, and if the SEC involved decides to rule that a broker cannot limit what stocks can be bought or sold because that would break the legal definition of what a brokerage is.

Does anyone know the law well enough to know if this is indeed a violation of any statutes?

dcolkitt2• 5 years ago

There’s no law whatsoever that says a brokerage has to trade all stocks.

Sohcahtoa824• 5 years ago

There are dozens of trading platforms, and RH isn't the only major one that offers free trades.

I expect that a lot of RH users are going to do some research and discover that there are alternatives that are just as good, or even better.

StriverGuy• 5 years ago

This is a bit of a dense question - but being shut out of trading a stock doesn't physically threaten someones life. So not exactly analogous to the twitter situation you are clearly alluding to.

marcinzm• 5 years ago

Robinhood can do whatever it wants and people can in response give it a 1 star rating. They can also complain about it not being a good platform to use. Freedom goes both ways.

You can also complain about Twitter or give its app a low rating or just stop using it.

randompwd• 5 years ago

Robinhood can do whatever it wants

Is that in it's terms of service?

postsantum• 5 years ago

Technically, anyone can do whatever they want but go to jail later

renewiltord• 5 years ago

Obviously the argument applies. Retail are aiming to punish them by no longer using them. It's freedom.

javier123454321• 5 years ago

I mean, doing something that will have a significant effect on markets is manipulation, which is regulated by the sec. It does apply, but it won't change. The only way to prevent this is removing the intermediaries, which events like this are pushing people towards.

unethical_ban2• 5 years ago

Holy shit, I can't believe people are comparing RH to Twitter, retail investment and corrupt hedge funds to people inciting violence against election results.

FWIW, this is an app in a supposedly regulated sector, making the call to affect stock prices and cut retail investors out of the market and causing a stock to tank.

jb7753• 5 years ago

I'm not comparing RH to Twitter, I'm comparing a private business' decision to a private business' decision, per your logic on the Twitter situation (banning any loud right-wing person). Time will tell if RH actually did anything illegal. If they didn't, then your previous Twitter logic should hold....i.e. "they're a private business and they can do whatever they want"....right?

I think what's ACTUALLY going on (whether your cognitive dissonance will allow you to perceive this comment or not), is that since this doesn't cut across political lines, you want to treat the situation differently.

proto-n• 5 years ago

No it doesn't apply. If you are dining in a restaurant and it starts putting cocaine into your coffee, that's still very illegal, regardless of whether you can choose another restaurant.

One sided halting in a moment like this reeks of market manipulation, which is illegal.

robntheh00d2• 5 years ago

Citadel reloaded shorts before RH cut off gme and the rest

https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1354853920762253315?s=2...

dcolkitt2• 5 years ago

Virtually every large multistrat fund is short GME now. This doesn’t really mean anything.

robntheh00d2• 5 years ago

Citadel transacts Robinhood trades and is overstretched due to Melvins stupidity

Setting a short position then cutting off trades is pretty textbook market manipulation

Sohcahtoa824• 5 years ago

"Just got a tip" has about as much clout as "I'm making this up"

rammy12342• 5 years ago

Gamestop is not supported on Robinhood. I get a message -- " This Stock is not supported on Robinhood"

unanswered• 5 years ago

This stock is not supported on Robinhood.

This is a jabberwocky sentence. It is syntactically correct but there is nothing in the real world to which it could be referring. Brokers do not "support" stocks.

no_one_ever• 5 years ago

This is suggesting a technical support, not a rah-rah support.

pixxel• 5 years ago

Sharing my lookup of jabberwocky.

n. Nonsensical speech or writing. adj. meaningless, worthless adj. absurd, nonsense, non-sensical

From Wiki: "Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

Wonderful word.

zionic4• 5 years ago

Oh it's "supported" if you try to sell it. They only stop you from buying.

rammy12342• 5 years ago

why should they stop ? are they really allowed to ?

babypuncher• 5 years ago

It's going to be real funny when all the lemmings pumping up GME's price lose all their money.

bufferoverflow2• 5 years ago

I predict Google will whitewash their rating within a month.

bagacrap5• 5 years ago

what incentive do they have to do that?

askl56• 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/TheQuartering/status/1354909724869853188

They already have

99_00• 5 years ago

Better to have 1 star and stay open than to be shutdown one way or another.

Music, taxis, retail, newspapers, politics and others have been disrupted by technology and the incumbents have suffered.

The establishment players have all seen this and they aren't going to let it happen again to them. They'll let technology in but only the way they want.

And now that deplatforming companies and powerful from credit-card, cloud providers, app stores, communications is normal and accepted they have more power and control than ever.

If I was robinhood I would do the same thing. Standing up for a principle is only going to get you shutdown and have everyone hate you after the fake news vilifies you and drags you through the gutter.

coliveira• 5 years ago

I think it is ridiculous that Robinhood took the matters in their own hands to halt trading on GME. If anyone had to do this was the SEC. It is just outrageous.

brink• 5 years ago

The Parler incident sent a message across the tech industry that this kind of behavior is acceptable.

Whether you liked Parler or not, the lynching of Parler was ultimately a loss for everyone for the precedent that it set.

afavour4• 5 years ago

I’m honestly very confused why people keep trying to draw a parallel between Parler and Robinhood. Beyond “big companies can do whatever they want” there really isn’t much in the way of comparison. And big companies doing what they want is something we’ve known about since around the time big companies first started to exist.

charonn0• 5 years ago

I don't see a correlation between the two incidents.

vkou3• 5 years ago

But they haven't blocked trading on GME. They still allow selling of GME.

It's pretty blatant market manipulation.

alangibson8• 5 years ago

One of the good things I see coming out of Robinhood blocking trading, Twitter and Reddit booting problematic users, Parler getting vaporized, etc. is a sudden realization amongst people of just how easily major parts of their lives can be instantly turned off by intermediaries.

My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.

ashtonkem4• 5 years ago

Anti-trust law is a far cleaner way to approach that, with far fewer unintended consequences.

karlmcguire• 5 years ago

Yea, because that's been working great thus far.

tw600040• 5 years ago

"movement from platforms to protocols" is essentially anti-trust laws codified

asdfasgasdgasdg• 5 years ago

I definitely support the notion of moving from platforms to protocols, at least in theory. I do think you're going to run into the need to regulate wherever communication starts impinging on not-purely-informational constructs, like securities.

I really hope that gambling on GME is not a "major part" of a significant number of people's lives.

alangibson8• 5 years ago

I was thinking more about being able to trade online, not GME specifically.

TBH 'protocols not platforms' has become kind of a slogan lately, but history doesn't make it look too promising. Email is a protocol, but it has largely been dominated by Google.

A really compelling product can capture a protocol.

heimatau• 5 years ago

I really hope that gambling on GME is not a "major part" of a significant number of people's lives.

It's a major part of the mega wealthy's lives. They've profited in this pandemic and it's not because of the fundamentals. Shorts squeeze the market too much but they ( hedge funds) should be responsible adults and take their losses. Not force Robinhood to unethically force sell it's massive user base to liquidate b/c their system bit their biggest customer.

We're about to see whether the people actually have rights or if this is actually a class warfare situation. I suspect it's the latter.

sebmellen• 5 years ago

There was a relevant document posted earlier today at this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25942632.

"Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)"

Article subtitle:

Altering the internet's economic and digital infrastructure to promote free speech

I am somewhat skeptical of crypto, but I do hope that the DeFi ecosystem, 20 years in the future, will act as a democratizing force for financial markets.

zionic4• 5 years ago

DeFi is a core component of my ETH bull hypothesis. All this decentralized activity requires the purchase of ETH to pay for/transact on.

ant6n• 5 years ago

But how can you get rich with protocols instead of platforms?

daenz• 5 years ago

At the risk of sounding like an "I told you so" type of person, it is frustrating to speak out and see others speak out about future consequences of these kinds of actions, only to be drowned out by people liberally applying the slippery slope fallacy argument.

thisiscorrect• 5 years ago

I've never understood how a slippery slope argument is a fallacy, let alone a logical fallacy (like false syllogism or no true scotsman). The idea is essentially looking at current trends and extrapolating into the future. No prediction is necessarily correct, but it's not necessarily wrong either.

jhayward• 5 years ago

Ok, since it's a fallacy, I have some mountain trails I'd like you to walk today. They are icy, but since it's a fallacy, I doubt you'll fall to your death.

yters• 5 years ago

Well, once the gov cracks down on ISPs game over. No way we can have a grassroots internet without the ISPs.

treeman792• 5 years ago

Maybe make Protecting free speech part our governments highest law.

Maybe we could amend the law. Seriously.

Lots of people love to dump on the constitution as old and not relevant. But it’s meant to restrict government and protect people’s freedom.

layoutIfNeeded• 5 years ago

B-but what if people say mean things? :/

thephyber4• 5 years ago

From my perspective, you just flipped the purpose of 1A.

Right now you have the right to associate or disassociate with whomever you like (protected classes aside). In your altered future, the government forces churches to allow atheists and rival religions to be allowed to speak at the church, despite the desires of the owners and congregation. It would effectively be compelled association.

frankfrankfrank• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if you were trying to be sarcastic, but to your last point; I think it is overlooked (intentionally or not) that the Constitution is already a set of laws and the highest laws at that. The "Bill of Rights" is not what people have been misled to believe, a list of rights you have and are given by government. In fact, they are the bill of laws that restrain the government from infringing on the natural God given rights every American already has by birth.

Having a correct and accurate understanding of that carries a whole host of implications with it, e.g., it makes the tech companies' censorious autocratic behavior a violation of the natural God given human rights that the government is as prohibited from abridging as much as the tech companies that fall under it's jurisdiction.

What we are facing, just to continue the example to further illustrate the point, is the tech companies are violating human rights through their censorious ways and they are violating the Constitution, the highest law of the land. If the USA were still a functional and healthy society any court would issue an immediate order to require all tech companies to not violate the human rights that the Constitution prohibits any inferior jurisdiction (everything falling under the Constitution, i,e., everything) from violating. The US Code even provides penalties for the violation of the Constitutional laws that the Government and the tech companies are persistently and even maliciously violating on a regular basis.

It is rather clear that the far larger problem is the breakdown of fundamental rule of law (mutually agreed upon parameters for peace) and the replacement and encroachment of ever more rule of power (I will do whatever I want because I have the ability to make you). It will not end well one way or another if it is not fixed soon, and it does not look like those with the lust of power in their eyes have any intention of giving up anything.

SamBam2• 5 years ago

So the government would force private corporations to let anyone say what they wanted on their sites? And this new sweeping government power would somehow.... restrict the government?

Do you not see how that's contradictory?

And what would it even look like? Would Hacker News no longer be allowed to have moderators?

ampdepolymerase• 5 years ago

A better way would be to update the definition of a public square to take into account the exponential scaling offered by digital services. Communication and commerce infrastructure should not be allowed to censor the moment they cross a critical point in scale.

gameswithgo2• 5 years ago

What is your hope for reforming the ability of a single person to keep repeating a lie and nearly causing an insurrection?

alangibson8• 5 years ago

I wouldn't say 'nearly'. The Capitol Riot definitely fit the standard definition of an insurrection.

Your 'single person' straw man aside, I don't think the conduits of conversation are the right place to attack this problem. It's just far too risky to have utterly unaccountable businesses be in the business of policing what people say.

I have the radical opinion that the police should be doing the policing. If people are criming online (threats of violence, planning to overthrow the government), they should get a visit from The Law.

preommr• 5 years ago

That it should be up to congress and law enforcement - people that are accountable to the public, to make these rules.

Everything about what twitter did was stupid. They let him talk for years, and then finally stopped him at the worst time. They cancelled him when there was little more damage he could do and ruined ideas of free speech neutrality and it allowed his ilk to claim censorship and it helped with making him a martyr. Just absolute stupidity.

Letting corporations deal with dangerous thought leaders is not a solution that has even the slimmest chance of working.

chrisco2553• 5 years ago

Voter fraud happened. There's video evidence of it occurring in State Farm Arena in Fulton County, GA. There's forensic evidence of 70% failure rates on voting machines in Antirim County, Michigan. There's 1000+ witness affidavits signed and presented under the penalty of perjury in various legislatures around the country. There's also statistical fraud detection algorithms that have numerous red flags with regards to the 2020 election. Repeating the lie that claims of fraud are unsubstantiated is the real problem. We have a broken, hackable electoral system with systemic issues.

worker7674242• 5 years ago

Throwing this out there, too: assorted government restrictions and lockdowns imposed by regional public health officials. The early ones were more justified because we knew less, but as the pandemic drug on, the burden of proof justifying closures needed to increase, and legislators needed to step up and legitimize the policies. It's like how the president can wage war for 90 days, but then has to get approval from congress.

engineer_223• 5 years ago

I'm with you on this. It's shameful that Congress and State Legislatures have abdicated power to executive functionaries indefinitely. We're closing in on D-Day+1 year and our deliberative bodies have yet to deliberate our public health policies (although Congress has proven they can stimulate demand for consumer goods, from time to time).

8ytecoder2• 5 years ago

Especially in states like California. My rich friends can and continue to travel. My friends in the service sector are at home collecting a meager unemployment. It doesn’t jibe well with the ethos CA proudly proclaims. They shutdown outdoor dining and even playgrounds while Costco, Amazon warehouses and Best Buy can be packed. We also know and have data that masks work but salons were closed. (A case in Texas comes to mind where a barber had covid but didn’t pass it to any of the 45 clients because they wore masks). What was way more important was good ventilation and indoor masking.

In general social psychology have to be factored in as well. Anecdotally speaking, shutting down outdoor dining pushed more people to party at home.

ziziyO• 5 years ago

We needed to put more people at risk because we couldn’t prove that they would get sick?

x3iv130f• 5 years ago

The closures were tied to ICU overflow capacity which seems a reasonable policy to me.

Unfortunately what and how things were closed seemed haphazard and not entirely justified or communicated effectively.

There should have been more contact tracing and a focus to close only areas prone to spreading Covid-19.

tima101• 5 years ago

I hope that these events make more people put their savings and time into their own projects instead of bitcoin and stocks.

worik3• 5 years ago

...and stop the idea that you can make money by being a smart investor.

It is possible.

It is possible to make money buying lottery tickets too.

The best way to make money is to work for it. Yet because of a demand for profit and return on investment working people are getting squeezed with low wages and bad conditions.

Outrage at a invest platform doing some thing or another - I do not care about that. My outrage is at low wages and bad conditions for ordinary working people

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 5 years ago

My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.

I don’t have much hope for this, mainly because being the owner of a platform is much more profitable than being one of many protocol end points. Look at git. It is hard to think of a more open protocol, and yet GitHub absolutely dominates and it is a big deal if they decide to cut off your repo.

A better alternative is for government to fund and operate critical infrastructure or at least heavily regulate it.

I don’t have to worry that I will get deplatformed from mail, because the USPS is there and they have strict legal requirements prohibiting them from deplatforming people. I don’t have to worry that I won’t be deplatformed from roads, because most roads are operated by the government, which is under strict legal precedents that they can’t deplatform me. It is similar with utilities such as electricity, water, gas which are privately operated but heavily regulated.

Some of the internet infrastructure is both becoming more vital as has economies of scale such that there is an inherent drive for consolidation. As such, I think it is becoming time that such things be regulated like utilities.

engineer_223• 5 years ago

Is EFF doing the work to advocate for responsible regulation? Is there an alternative to EFF (Electronic Frontiers Foundation) that is more in line with the spirit of your comment?

bananabreakfast2• 5 years ago

You are using the term "deplatform" completely wrong.

None of the things you mention are platforms.

Mail is not a platform. Roads are not a platform. Electricity, water and gas are not platforms.

These are all examples of point to point connection. None of them allow you to reach millions of people unfederated.

If you start sending out illegal hate mail to millions of people, you bet you'll be "deplatformed" by the USPS. They will cut off your account and probably press charges.

bluetwo• 5 years ago

Until you get rid of forced arbitration clauses, consumer rights are an illusion.

8ytecoder2• 5 years ago

I’m less into the free speech component. I think companies should have the right to curate a community they see fit.

What I do care about is moving to protocols and data portability. I want the ability to switch to another provider if I’m not happy with their decisions. I absolutely don’t like my data being held hostage.

I also hope this realization extends to things like GMail which hasn’t yet seen a similar scrutiny

at-fates-hands• 5 years ago

Robinhood was just hit with class action lawsuit over this:

The financial trading app Robinhood is been hit with a federal class action lawsuit after it restricted trades to stocks popular on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets, sending Redditors and app users into a meltdown.

The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York on Thursday, alleges that the app “purposefully, willfully, and knowingly removing the stock ‘GME’ from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock rise, thereby deprived [sic] retail investors of the ability to invest in the open-market and manipulating the open-market.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/robinhood-hit-with-class-actio...

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

I think calling for violence then carrying out actual violence is a bit different than this. But yes, it's like these giants now have a taste for deplatforming and are liberally applying it now.

MuffinFlavored• 5 years ago

I'm not optimistic an "open-source brokerage" will ever exist. Barrier to entry is probably too high/impossible to overcome. Big hedge funds would just flat out refuse your orders or prioritize them at garbage levels.

riedel• 5 years ago

I think it is perfectly normal that major parts of ones life can be turned off by intermediaries. It is just that they have been become rather abstract and difficult to yell at.

drewcon2• 5 years ago

Yeah I can't wait to live in a world where we enable more financial market mobbing by the uninformed and emotional masses. What could go wrong?

Tune will change when RSUs and 401ks get effected.

leesalminen• 5 years ago

I don’t know about you, but the vast majority of people I know don’t have RSUs nor 401ks.

KirillPanov• 5 years ago

Never going to happen as long as people insist that stuff works on their walled-garden cellphone.

Cellphone lockdowns are the keystone here.

There are sensible arguments for cellphones being walled gardens (grandmas can't defend their phone against malware, etc), but this is the devil's bargain you have to accept.

As long as people (a) want everything on their cellphone and (b) want it to be locked-down enough that they can trust it to not listen in on them and stalk their location, everything downstream of the cellphone will be intermediated.

vineyardmike2• 5 years ago

Nah, i have tons of open-protocol stuff on my cell phone. And i could make more (with some time and my technical knowledge) if i wanted/needed.

It would be nice if it was easier to enter/exit the garden at will, sure, but thats not the same thing.

I'm technically competent but these systems are so complex i don't think i could defend against malware in a complete open system. Actually, they're so complex that i do not think its possible to completely defend against malware as an end user without serious changes to behavior that is undesirable to most (eg. stop download apps so freely)

eternalban• 5 years ago

At this rate, they will red pill everyone with a pulse. It's a good thing (/s alert) that we have legislative solution in the pipeline just in time to address the inevitable social consequences.

Zigurd• 5 years ago

This isn't All One Thing. It isn't even all one thing inside the Robin Hood/Gamestop thing. Wall Street Bets got banned on Discord for calls to violent action, on the one hand, and their bets got throttled on Robin Hood because Robin Hood's data customers, who are legal-ishly front-running Robin Hood users, do not like what Robin Hood users are legal-ishly doing.

breakfastduck• 5 years ago

I actually think you are sadly wrong with that hope, as much as I also wish it were true.

Unfortunately, many people (sadly including the far left, who 10 years ago I would have called myself part of) & the media are actively celebrating these blocks and shutdowns because it serves their ideology. For now.

balls1872• 5 years ago

I just ran through a thought experiment--if Google (gmail) Apple (my phone) and Tmobile (the current owners of my number) all simultaneously nuked me, could I recover?

Luckily yes. Online access would be hindered, but nearly all my financial resources are handled through a local credit union.

asenna3• 5 years ago

Even better - having savings in a crypto hardware wallet :)

subsubzero• 5 years ago

I agree, instead of the original idea of the internet being a utopia of free speech, decentralization and free trade, it has devolved into a place where a select few oligarchies reign supreme pushing their views and actions onto the billions of users forced into their monopolies. Laws do not apply to them and even when they break their own TOS there are no repercussions.

A strong digital rights for users is a good start, but I think the end goal is that they(the tech monopolies) are essential utilities for a majority of the world and should be regulated as such. A CEO should not be able to silence a democratically elected leader from a communications platform(congress or a govt. communications committee should decide), users should be able to buy the stock of their choosing(the SEC can decide to halt trading pending illegal behavior) and not have that right removed by a companies CEO.

974373493200• 5 years ago

My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.

I hope so too and I hope that movement will develop and adopt technological solutions and not advocate for government force. This is an opportunity for people to control their means of communication and create a more robust internet that can better withstand censorship attempts in the future. I fear it will instead be taken advantage of by people who want to increase government control perhaps to prevent competition with the currently dominant actors on the market. Any further normalization of government control of communication or the internet must be resisted if we are to have any chance to keep the truly wonderful thing that the internet is today, despite all its imperfections.

chaostheory• 5 years ago

This should help kickstart a new decentralization movement.

chemmail• 5 years ago

That assumes people can see past Friday, not happening.

inopinatus• 5 years ago

Alternative take; the following are not major parts of your life:

Robinhood, Parler, Twitter, Reddit (et cetera)

but represent trivial ephemera whose significance for the individual, following abandonment/deletion, vanishes into hindsight once the endowment effect and separation anxiety wears off.

x86_64Ubuntu• 5 years ago

I don't think any of the services you've cited are considered "major" services by any stretch of the imagination.

Majestic121• 5 years ago

Yes, they are considered major services by a lot of people.

g9yuayon3• 5 years ago

I doubt it. Robinhood is now citing misinformation as the reason to "protect its users". Misinformation and disinformation are really the weapons of mass destruction. Cite it, and you get your superpower. Twitter does it. FB does it. Media, oh media loves it. So, what's wrong with Robinhood again?

ck2• 5 years ago

I'm still wondering when we are going to get neighborhood-wide and then chained mesh wifi networks that bypass ISPs

I know that exists in pieces and small projects but it's not like more than a few dozen people in any town even can fathom what that is or why it's a good idea.

Google and Apple would never do this but imagine if every smartphone came not only with built in mesh-wifi ability but was on by default so it all acted as a repeater, you could probably communicate across entire states and countries given enough seconds like store-and-forward and ham radio-like solutions.

dumbfounder• 5 years ago

On iTunes it is still rated 4.8, but they have a lot more ratings overall (2.4m vs 335k).

jb7753• 5 years ago

Time for everyone to cash in their 401k's (aka the system where the middle class gives their life savings to the elites).

If there's this level of blatant corruption, who really thinks they won't get screwed out of their retirement savings in a few decades?

ashtonkem4• 5 years ago

I smelled a rat in Robinhood back when they first showed up. When something goes from paid to free, the only appropriate response is to question how that happened, and what changes in motivation now exist.

ziftface3• 5 years ago

I'm learning recently to be a lot more critical about this sort of thing than I used to be.

mkl95• 5 years ago

Seems fair. The app has rendered itself useless.

rvnx• 5 years ago

Not only they cheated their own users, they also artificially manipulated the market and that eventually defrauded users of other brokers who legitimately expected a buy pressure coming from Robinhood users.

So, 1-star is even too much, jail time would be preferred.

ziftface3• 5 years ago

I don't know what the next step is, but the fact that pretty much everyone knows that there will be no jail time despite them openly committing crimes to defraud so many people isn't going to lead us somewhere good.

Triv8882• 5 years ago

I didn't down-vote them yet, because I used to use only the web app and haven't use them in a while, but I will make sure to down-vote.

MisterBastahrd• 5 years ago

Not allowing users to purchase shares and also selling owned shares against the wishes of users will have that effect.

fireeyed2• 5 years ago

Apple is blocking ratings of Robinhood on AppStore. Coincidence much ? "Its a big club and you ain't in it" - George Carlin

donohoe2• 5 years ago

Don't think so. I just rated it now. It seems to work.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/robinhood-investing-for-all/id...

TecoAndJix• 5 years ago

If you sort by most recent the last posting was yesterday (mobile)

themodelplumber2• 5 years ago

Opinion: With such wild swings in emotion in the markets right now in general, you can't expect investment app ratings to be even remotely objective.

IMO Apple is making proactive moves to protect their store's rating system reputation, such as it is.

I've used RobinHood since 2016 (not my only brokerage) and the app continues to be fine. It's not a race car, it's more like a family sedan. The company has been reasonably good at messaging and a number of other brokerages also halted buying of $gme, $nok, etc.

So not only is RobinHood not getting a fair shake (we haven't even heard their side of things), but other brokerages are getting _way_ more than what's fair for them given that they did the exact same thing.

wmeredith2• 5 years ago

"Apple is making proactive moves to protect their store's rating system reputation"

Ah, that's a good one.

cabaalis• 5 years ago

Alpaca sent me a notice this morning that they are also restricting trades. It's network behavior like this that is troubling.

Triv8882• 5 years ago

If everyone in the U.S. would buy only one share of GME, that would probably be enough to screw a few billionaires.

LittlePeter• 5 years ago

There are 67.5m GME shares outstanding. So yeah, 300m+ people competing to own single share would drive GME up.

systematical• 5 years ago

Brigaded. They are toast. Everyone I know with a RH account is going to close it.

bigmattystyles2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if this is new as of today - but to close (deactivate) your robinhood account, you need

1. No outstanding trades 2. a $0.00 balance 3. Contact support and (optionally?) give a reason

(1) and (2) make sense, but is (3) new?

I wonder if there is a mass exodus - there should be.

pram• 5 years ago

I'd wait to get your tax docs before you do this though, lol

bigmattystyles2• 5 years ago

They explicitly state those will still be available even if your account is deactivated.

lucasmullens• 5 years ago

It's not even that it rounds to 1 star, it's actually 1.0 stars (according to the aria-label on the HTML). The difference between a 1.4 and 1.0 is huge in terms of what percent of reviews are actually favorable.

tomcam• 5 years ago

Still too high

jxf• 5 years ago

This is interesting in that it provokes the question of what an app's rating "means". Clearly, if you were getting the app because you expected to be able to trade GME and you can't, then this is a good signal not to get the app. But not all "protest votes" of this sort may be equally good signals.

bmcahren• 5 years ago

I would argue most of the 1 star reviews are users like myself feeling betrayed who are speaking with their dollar, share, and review votes by leaving the app entirely.

dpedu• 5 years ago

Is the algorithm that does or doesn't promote apps on the app store able to differentiate between "protest votes" and "real" votes?

peheje• 5 years ago

Agree. I think the answer is it means whatever Google wants it to mean for this particular app.

shadykiller• 5 years ago

I had already transferred all my stocks from Robinhood to my company provided Fidelity account sometime back after reading about their shady practices last year:

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-321

devops000• 5 years ago

They could have blamed the SEC, and the users would have hated the SEC instead of them.

jackfoxy2• 5 years ago

Most of the other brokerages (Schwab, Etrade, and TD Ameritrade, but NOT Fidelity and Vanguard according to the reports I am getting) are participating. According to the rumor on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassActionRobinHood/comments/l723k... the call came from the White House.

542458• 5 years ago

I wouldn’t give that rumour any serious thought considering there’s literally nothing backing it up and it mostly just feeds what people already want to believe.

People are pointing out in the comments that some of the details don’t line up, like him being based in the wrong city and him overhearing conversations while WFH.

kibwen• 5 years ago

For real, despite three years of QAnon people are still failing miserably to apply any incredulity about whatever they read on the internet. That it affirms their beliefs is all that matters, never mind its veracity.

caseysoftware• 5 years ago

The CEO of the Nasdaq suggested it yesterday: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstocks/nasdaq-ceo-suggest...

jklein112• 5 years ago

It looks like I can still buy with my Schwab account?

rcstank• 5 years ago

I'm able to purchase these securities on ETrade just fine.

Edit: Just called E*TRADE. They now don't allow GME nor AMC trades unless you're closing your position.

jklein112• 5 years ago

In the words of Joe Biden, that rumor is pure malarky. I saw Vladimir on CNBC this morning in what looked to be his home. Unless the "low-level computer science" person was in the founders home, it seems very unlikely he "overheard" a convo with the White House. It seems like a dog whistle to me.

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

According to the rumor on Reddit

Well, there's a reliable source.

abstractbarista• 5 years ago

Schwab made GME non-marginable on 1/13. You can buy GME with your own settled cash on Schwab just fine. It has been tested.

jackfoxy2• 5 years ago

Confirmed by the person who originally reported about Schwab to me.

ehsankia• 5 years ago

The crazy rumors aside, at least this whole mess has clarified for me which brokerages to give my business to and which ones to boycott. It is the free market afterall, and people will be choosing with their $$$ which ones to support and which ones to boycott. The 1 star rating, while a bit extreme, also is part of the same idea.

You also kinda had it coming when you called yourself "robin hood" and then immediately bent over the moment the slightest challenge appeared.

robot1• 5 years ago

I honestly feel bad for all the employees, especially the early ones with equity that were looking forward to cashing out after the IPO - now they have to deal with immensely negative PR and federal investigations.

rumblerock• 5 years ago

For this reason I imagine that the first unconfirmed leak mentioned in another post will be far from the last. As if WSB vs. hedge funds wasn't a crazy enough story itself, the sequel to The Big Short is pretty much writing itself as the other players in the system expose exactly where they stand. Regulators and the Federal Government chapters incoming...

gigatexal• 5 years ago

Bowing to the whims of established trading firms to protect said firms being squeezed by a crazy army of day traders is a great way to ruin the rep your “Robinhood” trading app stands for. Score one for the little guy.

I’m hoping RobinHood gets sued out of existence and many of these hedge funds burn. The industry’s response to this is stupid and classist: “we can’t have randos making money...” as irrational as the system is it is working as is.

g9yuayon3• 5 years ago

Robinhood phrased their message as if it was for user's own good. Moralizing everything beyond protocol and rules and law has serious consequences. It does nothing but driving people cynical. Didn't the elites learn the stories of USSR political jokes, the stories of how East Germans (and ancient Chinese people) talked to each other via eye contacts only? It's not hard to guess what will happen when enough number of people stop trusting the system. For that matter, I'm so glad that AOC and Td Cruz can agree with each other to probe Robinhood's practice.

shostack• 5 years ago

Any links to good reading on the eye contact communication? That sounds really interesting.

g9yuayon3• 5 years ago

I don't know if there's any communication protocol with eye contact. People were so afraid of persecution that they used only eye contact to exchange feelings, or so I read. One may argue that it's different this time aforementioned persecution came from the governments. Well, it's worth remembering that it was ordinary people who voluntarily snitched each other during those horrible times, believing that they were on moral high ground. Or just ask Chinese: who beat professors and school principals to death? Who thought that business owners deserved to starve to death? Who thought eating flesh of person was righteous because that person was born in a middle-class family?

It looks many Chinese have learned their lessons from their own painful history, yet Americans didn't even care about history at all.

csours• 5 years ago

This reminds me of how casinos can kick people out for any reason or no reason at all. Treat meme stocks like a trip to the casino: don't wager more than you can lose.

interdrift• 5 years ago

Good.

sitzkrieg2• 5 years ago

a bunch of idiots acting like children because they don't know how clearing works, cool

donohoe2• 5 years ago

You're all free to rate it on iOS too...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/robinhood-investing-for-all/id...

gshakir2• 5 years ago

Already did

misiti37802• 5 years ago

Is there actual proof they colluded with Citadel, or is that just speculation? I'm very confused?

MauranKilom2• 5 years ago

What would that proof look like? Even if it was 100% what happened, I wouldn't hold my breath to see actual proof.

misiti37802• 5 years ago

Proof to me is more than Justin Kan tweeting out he heard that Citadel and Robinhood are working together ...

dang5• 5 years ago

For pointers to other vertices of this story graph, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25933543.

The current thread is paginated like all the other big threads (to spare our poor server—yes, we're working on it). If you want to see all the comments you'll need to click through the More links at the bottom, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947697&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947697&p=3

(and so on)

dang5• 5 years ago

(This is a stub reply so I can collapse the various comments responding to this, so as not to distract too much from the topic at hand. (Sorry, non-JS users.))

imdsm• 5 years ago

The HN server has been so faithful to us. I hope it's feeling better soon.

anton96• 5 years ago

You can also add YouTube-dl and GitHub.

dj_mc_merlin3• 5 years ago

Thank you!

colejohnson66• 5 years ago

What exactly is the issue? (if you can share)

the_arun2• 5 years ago

Where can I find HN backend architecture?

noja• 5 years ago

Isn't there a front-running side to this story? With the front-runner pocketing billions? Isn't this how Robin Hood makes money? Anyone know?

partiallypro2• 5 years ago

The reason why this happened is that their clearing house stopped fulfilling their orders (totally out of their control,) but Robinhood bungled this so badly, I honestly wonder if they'll ever recover. WeBull had to do the same thing but they have a clear reason rather than "protecting investors" etc.

itsyaboi• 5 years ago

Riddle me this, who is Robinhood's clearing house?

partiallypro2• 5 years ago

I do agree Citadel, which I believe helped out one of the hedge funds in trouble form the short squeeze, being the clearing house is a "moral hazard" and a conflict of interest.

avipars• 5 years ago

What about on the apple app store?

kimsant• 5 years ago

Once again, the power of a phone call to the right person, asking for the right thing and offering the right compensation.

pelasaco• 5 years ago

today early in the morning, they had a 4.8 rating https://twitter.com/VincentMarcus/status/1354812744738828294...

archon810• 5 years ago

That isn't the Play Store.

Aperocky• 5 years ago

I feel like this action from Robin Hood saved a lot of retail trader from self harm.

A lot of people are clinging to the hope that whatever came out of shorts covering their position being false. Whereas given the volume of the previous days it's highly likely they've already gone. Whoever goes in at this point is likely going to end up losing everything.

shrimpx4• 5 years ago

More importantly it saved hedge funds like Melvin and Citadel form self-harm. They aggressively shorted these stocks into the ground, looking to make billions. If the prices stay up or keep going up, they stand to lose billions and even go out of business.

If you look at r/wallstreetbets, only a few people seem to have invested more than a couple of tens of thousands. The guy who came up with this idea to profit off of short squeeze seems to have invested only 53k. Most other people invested a few hundred or a few thousand. Also, people on r/wallstreetbets routinely show screenshots of their losses. It's kind of preposterous to move forward assuming these people don't know what they're doing, and Robinhood saved them...

These trading platforms are blatantly intervening to save the hedge funds, not the Reddit traders. Government may have a say in it, too, because they want market stability. And if these hedge have to sell their long positions to cover shorts, it could put a big dent in the market and even cause a larger scale crash.

bagacrap5• 5 years ago

how would that cause a crash? Retail (and less shady institutions) will buy more aapl when it dips and all that's happened at the end of the day is a big transfer of wealth from institutions to retail (and less shady institutions).

xmly• 5 years ago

The only reason they still have one start is because 1 is minimum.

AdamN• 5 years ago

That sound you hear is the evaporation of billions in pre-IPO Robinhood equity vanishing based on both a poor decision (to disallow buying of a stock that others could still buy) and worse, poor execution on their site that didn't make it clear how narrow the blocking was.

Those customers who have left Robinhood will never come back and it will take years to recover, if ever.

gshakir2• 5 years ago

It has five stars on Apple store, that’s quite a difference

matkoniecz• 5 years ago

Rating is displayed as 2 and half star for me.

ardy42• 5 years ago

It looks like it's ~2.75 stars now.

voodootrucker• 5 years ago

I just went there and it was 3.5 https://ibb.co/9pxhD4V

mijoharas• 5 years ago

I see it as 4* right now. Could it be to do with region? (I'm looking at it from the uk.)

KyleBerezin• 5 years ago

I also do 4 and I am on the US. Perhaps Google is deleting/ignoring reviews.

0-_-0• 5 years ago

Not anymore, Google deleted the bad reviews.

zain_saqer• 5 years ago

It has 4 stars now

Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store

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