Robinhood sued by family of 20-year old trader who committed suicide

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/robinhood-sued-by-family-of-alex-kearns-20-year-old-trader-who-killed-himself-.html

by pseudolus • 5 years ago

120 128 5 years ago

I've been following this story but this was new to me:

The suit says that Kearns made three attempts to contact Robinhood customer service regarding the massive underwater balance. However, his messages were met with automated replies, according to the complaint.

I wonder how the people who set up a brokrage dealing with people's hard earned money in such a way you couldn't get in contact with a human easily must feel after hearing this?

I get calls from Morgan Stanley just because a of a form error while initiating a transfer asking if I'd like them to do it for me, and RH is over here (wrongfully) telling people they're down almost a million dollars and then sending them to voicemail.

Even though it was a bug, you'd think there'd be some provision for this, like if an account suddenly went that far in the negative they'd freeze the account and contact you immediately (and yes, people will point out that means they can't sell if it bounces back, but if you actually owe RH 750k I'm pretty sure all your positions will be liquidated before you can cough...)

michaelt• 5 years ago

RH is over here (wrongfully) telling people they're down almost a million dollars and then sending them to voicemail.

Perhaps they're hoping to be the Google of the finance industry /s

diveanon2• 5 years ago

I don't know why you are getting downvotes, that's exactly who they drew inspiration from here.

xiphias22• 5 years ago

Is it that bad?

I love Google, use it all the time.

It's easy to complain, lots of companies tried and failed to comlete with it.

markdown• 5 years ago

Please stop spreading this lie. It's a falsehood I see on HN almost every single day.

I have received almost immediate support from a real human every single time I've contacted Google (dozens of times). This includes chat, email, and even phone support initiated by them... and I live in the a "third world" country in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and earn them no more than two figures a month.

In my experience, Google provides stellar support.

vimerate• 5 years ago

Previously discussed

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553794

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23523246

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23523379

bigpumpkin• 5 years ago

I just opened up my margined account on Interactive Brokers and it shows a large negative cash balance (exactly equal to what I borrowed on margin). I guess an inexperienced trader could've mistaken the negative cash balance as having negative equity value. Alex Kearns had a negative cash of -730k but a positive equity of $16k . Why did Robinhood send him an email asking for $170k in a few days?

Then later after his death, he received another email from Robinhood:

"Great news! We're reaching out to confirm that you've met your margin call and we've lifted your trade restrictions."

Did Robinhood's margin call system make a mistake?

beervirus• 5 years ago

Allegedly he had a trade set up with multiple legs. He wrote some puts and bought some mostly-offsetting puts. He got assigned on the puts he wrote, but the profit from the other leg of the trade didn’t show up in his account until the next business day.

totalZero6• 5 years ago

You don't know that you're assigned until the day after it happens. Even if you immediately exercise offsetting options upon notification of assignment, it takes a business day to clear out the shares.

quickthrowman• 5 years ago

Does anyone know what his position was? Probably vertical put spreads, credit or debit could’ve resulted in this situation.

Short put vertical: Underlying is at 392, sell 200 390P, buy 20 389P. Underlying moves to 387, counterparty exercises 20 ITM puts, now you’re long 2,000 shares at 390, you exercise your ITM 389P and sell 2,000 shares at 389 for a net $2,000 loss.

Long put vertical: Underlying at 392, buy 20 390P, sell 20 389P. Underlying moves to 387, counterparty exercises 20 ITM puts, now you’re long 2,000 shares at 389, you exercise your ITM 390P and sell 2,000 shares at 390 for a $2,000 net gain.

Either one of these would’ve shown a negative $780,000 balance when the early exercise happened, poor kid didn’t know it was recoverable.

Aeolun• 5 years ago

Well damn, now I understand how this would confuse someone. Remind me to never get started with options.

PHGamer• 5 years ago

the more i hear about options/puts and then the short counterpart i feel as if the whole game is convoluted to hide the fact that its less investing and more gambling.

avlewis• 5 years ago

Ehhh options really kinda kick ass, but only when you know what you are doing and understand the max profit and loss of a trade.

missedthecue3• 5 years ago

This same thing actually happened to me about a year ago in my speculation trading account. Here is a screenshot of what my account looked like on Saturday evening.

https://i.imgur.com/a2JmlyQ.jpg

Of course, I have a fairly advanced understanding of options and knew it was mathematically impossible to have lost that amount, so to me it was just a humorous and quirky bug in some startup software.

What I think needs to be noted is that the only way this young man would have gotten access to the level of options required to place a trade like that was to deliberately lie on his account application. Someone who was qualified to have the level of trading access he had would have immediately known he wasnt $780k in the hole. So while Robinhood wrote some bad code, there is some personal responsibility that should be assigned here. Such a sad situation.

ahelwer2• 5 years ago

Not sure about that last part. For some color, here's the Robinhood UI for buying calls: https://twitter.com/neoliberal_dad/status/135778483584729907...

lazyasciiart3• 5 years ago

Having not used Robinhood, can you explain what he had to say to get this access?

waprin• 5 years ago

It was partially noted in past threads, and partially missed, but this 20 year old didn't actually lose the money he thought he lost. It was basically a "leaky abstraction" of the backend that bubbled up. Their total lack of any real customer support since it's not "scalable" also contributed to this tragic adn avoiadable death.

potions• 5 years ago

Robinhood's legacy is commission free equity trades at pretty much every single retail brokerage, whether they survive as an app or not.

There is a reasonable argument to be made that whatever minute price slippage customers might experience(which I believe isn't even supposed to be legal due to NBBO and Reg NMS? not an expert) due to payment for order flow is much less than the $10 commissions at deep discount retail brokerages and certainly than the $50 trades in the old days of calling up your friendly local rent seeking broker -- for typical robinhood sized equity transactions.

Robinhood has plenty of problems but they directly caused investors to be able to trade for free @ fidelity, vanguard, schwab, etc which is obviously a boon to consumers.

Also imo at least robinhood is somewhat up front about like 'the market is a zany gambling game' with their UX. Contrast with IBKR and TOS who heavily market their stuff to Serious Portfolio Dads With 4 Monitors and then ALSO do sheisty manipulation appearing stuff to "protect their clients from volatility." RH targeting a smaller computer and being colorful doesn't make it any worse than other discount retail brokerages shoving derivative trading platforms at unsophisticated retail.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan4• 5 years ago

100% agree. The $5 - $10 commissions that existed forever are still a great deal if you're moving around serious amounts of capital and it gets your order fulfilled a few pennies cheaper, but when you're only trying to purchase a double-digit dollar amount of stock, they're ridiculous.

I really do believe Robinhood is a net positive in the world because it has provided the lower classes the ability to more easily buy a small sliver of the means of production.

Most people lose money when they first start trading and investing. A lot of people are going through that the first time right now, but losing money in the market is the first step to making money in the market, and eventually I think this commission-free environment (paired with approachable apps) will build a great deal of financial competence among the general population.

nealabq• 5 years ago

If only he'd realized that he could declare bankruptcy, he might not have been so overwhelmed. I think it wrecks your credit for about 7 years (?), but it's not the end of the world. This is so sad.

tantalor• 5 years ago

Maybe the parents could have tried harder to educate their kid about financial risk and consequences.

throwawayboise2• 5 years ago

The "kid" was 20. An adult man. How much insight do you suppose the parents had into his financial activities?

ClumsyPilot8• 5 years ago

I feel this comment is a mean platitude, given that most people on HN do not understand options trading and probably you are one of them. I am.

totalZero6• 5 years ago

I'm sure they will spend their lives wishing that they could go back in time and do so.

However, it's impossible to see every risk that comes the way of your loved ones.

filoleg3• 5 years ago

The thing is, he actually probably would've made some profit on that trade (or a small loss) after it all was said and done. He had a spread position, but only one leg of that spread was executed, while the other was still pending. So while the second leg is pending, the UI would only show one on the chart (while the other one is clearly marked in the UI as still active). Until that second leg is executed too, you will see that weirdness on the chart. But if you know how spreads work even on the most basic level, you will easily understand that this is not the actual balance of your account, it is just the pending balance until the other leg is executed. And the other leg was guaranteed to be executed, so it isn't like there was some uncertainty about that. All it takes is one business day tops for the second leg to get processed. For those curious, there are other comments in previous threads that explain the situation in much better detail, such as this one. [0]

This is a very known thing with spread positions, can be verified by just googling for a few minutes. And while his death is a tragedy that was easily avoidable, I don't think that it is fair to blame RH for this man's failure to do less than a few minutes of googling.

Important to note, this isn't unique to RH, this is pretty much how every broker displays that specific kind of a trade in their UI. And it isn't because they are all bad at UI, but because it is indeed an accurate representation of the state of the account at that moment. You just gotta make sure you actually understand the information you are looking at. And if you are doing option spreads with even the most basic knowledge of those, you should already be able to easily understand what those charts are actually displaying.

Not even mentioning that the parents claim he opened a trading account and started trading options as a college freshman, which is kind of impossible to get an approval for from RH (or any other broker) unless you make a lot of money already or lie on the application. And we know he didn't make a lot of money, because some of the headlines on the matter have mentioned "RH trader with no income manages to open a $750k position". So he indeed went around the rules (and the law) by lying to get a permission from the broker to trade options. Not trying to blame him for what happened, the situation is just unfortunate all around. I am simply struggling to think of anyone who could be honestly and justly blamed for this situation, aside from, maybe, his parents. But even that is a stretch.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23554588

ClumsyPilot8• 5 years ago

Thank you for informative post, however I feel you are being unfair to the kid.

"this man's failure to do less than a few minutes of googling" is true if you know what to google, but not if you are clueless.

Setting up OAuth is a few minutes of googling to me, but not to the boss of my boss.

synaesthesisx• 5 years ago

Or, as often said on WSB (like the numerous times people have accidentally discovered "infinite leverage" glitches), "Just delete the app!".

Seriously, people have done that - and Robinhood is too incompetent to follow up or take legal action.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan4• 5 years ago

It's more likely they realize trying to collect on that money would kick off a protracted legal battle, which they might lose. Investors do have some protections, and a glitch allowing infinite leverage is a definite, absolute fuck-up on Robinhood's part, which might be exploitable in court, not to mention the bad publicity it'd bring. (E.g. Robinhood sues working family into bankruptcy over glitch in its own app.)

pc865• 5 years ago

The Kearns’ family complaint says, “Not only did Robinhood permit Alex to open the account, but when Alex was a freshman in college later that year, it permitted him to trade options.”

You have to go out of your way to trade options (they're disabled by default), and the only way you can get options enabled in Robinhood as a college freshman is to straight up lie on the application.

“Worse, Robinhood provided almost no investment guidance, and its customer ‘service’ was virtually non-existent, consisting of automated e-mail replies devoid of any human contact or interaction,” the family alleged in the suit.

How many brokers provide investment guidance? How many do it without additional fees?

I've only reached out to Robinhood two or three times but a person has responded to the initial inquiry in all but one instance (where an automated email just said it would be a while, and a person followed up about a week later to actually address the issue).

Robinhood is a shit company and I look forward to incoming class action lawsuit but this is a grieving family lashing out and should be dismissed. If anything comes of this the only thing that's going to happen is there are going to be more roadblocks for retail investors to invest.

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

How many brokers provide investment guidance?

It is usually quite explicit that they are not providing investment advice with the online ones.

edgyquant• 5 years ago

Advice and guidance are two separate things (even if they sound the same.) Vanguard, for instance, has volumes explaining trading and investment strategies but advice would me more like implying you should use a strategy or buy a specific equity.

tidepod127• 5 years ago

You have to go out of your way to trade options (they're disabled by default), and the only way you can get options enabled in Robinhood as a college freshman is to straight up lie on the application.

If all it took was a lie on an application for Robinhood to grant someone the ability to use extremely risky trading strategies, that's still Robinhood's fault. Robinhood isn't absolved of responsibility just because the student did something dishonest.

Given the fact he was 20 years old, his options application should have automatically been under a heightened degree of scrutiny, if not immediately rejected. That it wasn't indicates Robinhood is not responsibly implementing KYC controls, which is a huge deal.

giantg26• 5 years ago

You're an adult 18. I think people need to take more responsibility for their own actions instead of this increasing trend of treating adults as kids.

nomel4• 5 years ago

If all it took was a lie on an application for Robinhood to grant someone the ability to use extremely risky trading strategies, that's still Robinhood's fault.

In your world, do we blame casinos when someone goes in and gambles away their money? My naive perspective sees no difference. The concept of an individual being responsible for their own terrible choices really seems to have changed unbelievably in the last 20 years.

Thorncorona• 5 years ago

RH's entire schtick is to be the amateur's investment broker. Their barrier to entry for margin and options is practically 0. When the only thing you need to do in order to get access to level 3 options is check a couple boxes, you're practically encouraging this type of activity. RH is breaking a ton of rules atm and there is a reason why most brokers are high touch for margin/options and unfortunately the Kearns' family is first hand evidence of this.

Most other brokers WILL NOT allow this. When I applied for options Schwab had a broker call me and make sure I knew about all the risks involved for the level I applied for.

RH was also down a couple times in March, which lost me a good amount of money. A week is a VERY long time if you're playing short-term options. There's also other issues where they were holding customer shares in margin when they had cash to cover, and when they've allowed customers to leverage 5k -> 1M of positions (a huge nono).

The conclusion here is that RH is a toy broker following the mantra of move fast and breaks things. Good if you're casually investing, but for options and serious investing with real amounts of cash it's worth getting a broker that is serious at providing reliable service.

tidepod127• 5 years ago

The conclusion here is that RH is a toy broker following the mantra of move fast and breaks things.

I personally see them at the Juul of the finance world. They're intentionally targeting young inexperienced people and telling them "just download this app and you'll be rich! all your friends are doing it, don't miss out!"

nightski3• 5 years ago

Not sure how many brokers you have applied to lately but -

TDA, Fidelity, Webull, Interactive Brokers, Tasty works, ETrade, and more all make options just as accessible as RH.

ROARosen2• 5 years ago

and a person followed up about a week late

I remember reading when the original story broke that the negative balance / suicide happened over a weekend.

And about the the negative balance, I've had a similar story (with much less). The problem is that once a long-short vertical option expires worthless, Robinhood showed a negative balance for the full amount of the short position, even if you had a long position covering most of it. Because they don't update the available balance/money you made from the long side until it clears (which can take a few days).

I believe it was extremely bad UX on Robinhood's part, even my heart skipped a beat when I saw the negative bal, and that was for only 5k.

brundolf2• 5 years ago

Imagine being the UX designer

tgsovlerkhgsel• 5 years ago

You have to go out of your way to trade options (they're disabled by default), and the only way you can get options enabled in Robinhood as a college freshman is to straight up lie on the application.

Isn't this a problem with most brokers? They all seem to require that you claim experience trading an asset class before they let you trade that asset class.

tidepod127• 5 years ago

Brokers are required by law to "protect" traders from financially harming themselves by restricting the trades that can be made until the trader verifies that they know what they are doing. Some brokers will go as far as to personally call you up and give you an on-the-spot quiz about how options work before letting you trade them, for example.

Many brokers seem to have gotten very lax about this in recent years, and even Schwab/Ameritrade allowed me to trade options without verifying anything. My guess is that the recent Robinhhood/GME fiasco is going to see FINRA cracking down hard and reinstating some strict verification procedures.

rickyc091• 5 years ago

Yeah, it's pretty easy to get level 3 trading option these days. In fact, if you select level 3 and answer incorrect, they even prompt you and say, hey that option won't let you get verified for level 3.

With older brokerage firms, they use to call you up after you signed up. You would have to chat with them on the phone before they unlocked your account.

JeremyBanks• 5 years ago

You have to go out of your way to trade options (they're disabled by default), and the only way you can get options enabled in Robinhood as a college freshman is to straight up lie on the application.

Could you please clarify, what does the application ask that he would have had to lie about?

pc865• 5 years ago

Questions like trading experience with different kinds of options, annual income, liquid net worth, total net worth are all pretty standard. Some brokers (not RH) also about about the source of your experience. Actual experience trading options may push you higher on the list than simply being instructed in what options are by an investment professional if you're otherwise on the border between two.

I've been declined for top options levels before because my total net worth was too low even with years of actual options trading experience (including complicated multi-leg strategies).

notyourwork• 5 years ago

Sadly I agree. The idea that someone willingly applied to have options trading available and is in fact an adult should be enough that its not the trading platform's fault.

gchamonlive• 5 years ago

If it were underage girls that lied for pornhub amateur and got accepted the argument would not hold, so I don't think it should hold in this case either.

It is the company's job to make sure the screening process is not too permissive.

ClumsyPilot8• 5 years ago

What I do not understand, is how do you just accept that a major company managing people's (potentially) life savings in a regulated market has no responsibility to pick up the phone? I would accept it if RH did not communicate with the customer at all because they were overwhelmed or something. But they did communicate, they sent out an email demanding money.

Do they have no process to talk to a customer who has lost a lot of money? This is not a rare freak event, it's key part of the business they are in. You'd think about this within the first 10 minutes of even entertaining the idea of starting a trading firm. Even the WSB reddit had a link to a suicide prevention hotline, how is RH more irresponsible than a random web forum.

We as a society don't need to bend over backwards to accomodate these zero-support business models - and especially not as the bedrock of our economy.

Lastly, I want to share a court case from Russia: for a few years it was common for banks to mass send out loan contracts in the post to random Tom, Dick and Harry. It would just appear in your postbox randomly, and if you countersign it you would get the money. One bloke scanned the document and amended it, he really went to town: increased the borrowing limit, put in a negative interest rate, etc. The bank signed it without realising. Obviously the bank sued, argued that their business model made it impossible to read every contract and the that the guy knew that.

The judge held up the contract, saying it wasn't the customers problem their business model involves spamming people and signing things without reading.

thedevelopnik• 5 years ago

Those are changes RH made in reaction to this kid killing himself. They added increased barriers and human interaction because of this, that weren’t present when this happened to him.

tarsinge• 5 years ago

Novice question: to lose that much money do you need to sell options? My understanding was that buying options was relatively safe.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan4• 5 years ago

Options are considered binary plays: they either expire in the money, or they expire worthless.

It would be trivially simple to empty out your entire account by buying foolishly deep out-of-the-money options. (E.g. betting that GameStop shares will be worth $800 by the end of the week).

mam22• 5 years ago

yes

but the catch is that he didn't lose the money really ... it was a UX glitch that made him suicide

pc865• 5 years ago

Some options (buying calls or puts, selling covered calls or cash-secured puts) are "safe" in the sense that you can't lose more than your initial investment. Some do have a larger downside that can exceed your initial investment, and some have technically infinite downside. That's why there are several levels of options, so you can be approved for the safe bets but not the ones that could cost you a million dollars on a $1,000 bet.

Gunax2• 5 years ago

The real question is whether it would have been better or worse for the case if he actually had lost 700k.

xyzelement• 5 years ago

Sad case but a completely inappropriate lawsuit. As society we allow people to chose to take risks they are comfortable with (otherwise everyone would be locked up in their homes wrapped in bubblewrap.)

I am not a RH user but I expect that to get started you have to transfer in money. To do anything with leverage (options, etc.) you certainly have to opt-in to additional agreements including indicating that you understand the risks, etc. Ultimately the steps of "wiring money in" or accepting "I understand I can lose more than I invested" should trigger something in your brain. And if it doesn't unfortunately you have to pay the price rather than somehow making the whole activity illegal.

Obviously this is a terrible situation for the family, but it's also a reminder that parents need to teach their kids common sense. For example: there's no free lunch. If your kid at 20 has the brain that says "oh duh there's free money here" you kinda messed up.

hypertele-Xii• 5 years ago

How about this for common sense: Don't kill yourself. Especially not over something as trivial as money.

Gunax2• 5 years ago

I think the lawsuit has more to do with RH accidentally showing a debt of 700k than actually letting people lose 700k on margin.

It will be settled out of court.

betwixthewires• 5 years ago

The article mentions the app misleading him into believing he had incurred the debt, but never goes into how it was misleading. Was he actually in that amount of debt, or was he misled? If he was in that level of debt, was he misled about the risks he was taking?

I'm not a fan of the argument "they shouldn't have let him make decisions he didn't understand" because I believe the onus is on us to know what we are doing before we do it, and arguments like these are what led us to our current regulatory framework disallowing investors into markets unless they meet capital requirements, essentially pricing everyone but rich people out of markets.

toomuchtodo• 5 years ago

Robinhood’s app is notorious for indicating a margin call when one is not forthcoming for complex options strategies (options spreads, in this case).

PSA: Please use a real brokerage when participating in capital markets. Fidelity is my recommendation, but others are at parity if not close. No one should be using Robinhood.

swrj• 5 years ago

More people would if mobile apps weren't horrible. I have schwab and fidelity and the lack of basic features like listing option greeks, auto refreshing tick values, L2 data by established brokerages is baffling.

13of40• 5 years ago

Funny you should mention Fidelity - I have their "full view" thing set up so I can see my accounts at other banks and brokerages on one screen. Late last year I did a wire transfer from my bank to a brokerage, and the brokerage credited me for the amount immediately, before the bank deducted it. On January 1, the sum of all my accounts was some not-insubstantial number of dollars higher than reality, and that's what Fidelity captured as my starting balance for the year. Then everything settled, and I logged in to Fidelity around January 3 to a message that since the beginning of the year my investments had lost that not-insubstantial amount of value. Heart skipped a beat.

diveanon2• 5 years ago

This entire disaster will be the end of robinhood, and frankly it couldn't happen to more deserving people.

Kharma is a bitch, and when you build a business based on virtue signaling and lies you had better expect for it to come back and bite you.

Meekro• 5 years ago

This is extremely sad. The lawsuit claims that Robinhood's shitty tech support was one of the major factors here. Between that, the numerous bugs, and the way they've been blocking people from trading in Gamestop, I can't understand why people choose to use it over the alternatives.

I've always done my trading through Schwab, and my experience has been worlds different from what I read in the news about Robinhood. Schwab hasn't restricted the trading of any stocks or options, and they make professional support as available as air. Whether it's technical issues or basic investment advice, I can easily get in touch with them by phone or email.

mizzack• 5 years ago

I've had this happen after getting assigned on a short leg. Massive negative balance in the UI, locked account, angry margin call emails from RH.

The messaging around this is terrifying because it is all boilerplate risk management stuff -- nothing you'd expect if you were naively engaged in a controlled risk spread.

The thing to keep in mind is that RH won't let you engage in infinite risk positions. So, if this happens, take a deep breath and maybe re-read a few sections on Investopedia.

ada1981• 5 years ago

This is tragic, but misguided.

I was sued for $55MM this year after my (now former) business partner lost $5MM to Vietnamese mafia which triggered a loss for a customer.

Was crazy, but I took a deep breath and realized worse case was personal bankruptcy if they pierced the LLC.

The worse case scenario for this kid would have been 7 years of bad credit (had he lost $750k).

There were some deeper things going on in his life and family system that no one is talking about.

Oh, I ended up selling my position to my partner, getting indemnified and walking away with a few hundred grand (some still be to paid). It was super stressful, and I’m really grateful I’ve learned how to process painful experiences (I work as a mindset coach to billionaire tech founders).

DoreenMichele2• 5 years ago

I haven't been following this, so I don't have a lot of context, and a quick google doesn't tell me if he had student loans or much of anything about the context of his life.

Some initial thoughts that may be wildly off the mark:

1. Is it pertinent that he was a college student in a world where student loans are eating the futures of students while not giving them the good careers they thought it guaranteed?

2. Is it pertinent that the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer during the pandemic? It's kind of a winner-take-all economy and we just crap all over everyone else and then blame them as lazy whiners who need to try harder and basically tell them "shut up!" if they try to point out "I'm doing all I can and it's never enough because the system is broken."

3. If you aren't one of the "winners" you get kind of this dystopian reality where you can't get health coverage, you can't get housing, once you are homeless no one wants to hire you so escaping seems nigh impossible, etc.

4. We have raised the ceiling on our economy and put in no floor. Then we wonder when folks slip through the cracks.

5. If you have overwhelming real world problems such that it makes you think suicide is your only option and you try to talk to someone, you will most likely be dismissed as "mentally ill" for being suicidal.

This is tragic and I assume Robinhood does need to handle things differently, but I can't help but wonder what this says about or how this relates to other societal issues in the US today.

syntaxing• 5 years ago

It’s such a hard balance between regulation to protect the people vs freedom of will. I’m not entirely sure what’s the solution is but RH is definitely inching towards user exploitation.

throwitaway1235• 5 years ago

It's one thing (a quite annoying thing) for free non-monetary services to not have phone support, but a service that houses your money is inexcusable.

CryptoPunk• 5 years ago

He was an adult and he's responsible for his own decisions. We can't turn the world into safe space for every poorly equipped adult.

This is not to lessen the tragedy of this situation in any way. Acknowledging a tragedy doesn't have to involve trying to find a sue-able party to blame it on.

scotty79• 5 years ago

Stock market investment services should be treated same way as gambling. Warren Buffet's long bet with hedge funds proves it is nothing more than that.

gher-shyu3i• 5 years ago

People have to start owning up to their decisions. Unfortunately, society has deemed suicide as acceptable. Where's the role of the parents to teach their children not to commit suicide? Shifting blame like this is not going to solve anything.

Note that I'm not excusing the current financial system that has basically become legalized gambling more or less (like options and shorting).

Robinhood sued by family of 20-year old trader who committed suicide

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