It reveals that the whole "left vs. right" culture war is a massive sham designed to occupy and waste the all the plebian's attentions and get eyeballs on advertisers while the rich and powerful sit back and laugh.
And people already downvoting me...lol. Do you not realize you're just willing pawns?
Wait a minute. Are those big tech hearings not going to amount to anything? Approximately the exact same thing AOC's fake hearing/s will amount to. It's nothing more than populist grandstanding.
Because she’s been there for quite some time now and achieved very little legislatively.
The extreme grandstanding for her Twitter followers got her boxed out by her own party. She’s now just the lady with the socialist hot take for the evening news without any real means to change anything.
She's still a house representative, being known at all is a massive first step in such a large body.
She's also just survived her first election as an incumbent. Two years in the house as a freshman with a Senate and president that would block everything anyway is not a time scale where you can reasonably expect to have massive legislation passed.
I wish she would tone down rhetoric sometimes - There is a lot of straight-up factual fire to spit, and Ted Cruz did not literally factually try to murder her.
She could have made her point without that phrasing.
And the guy that got caught telling people to assassinate AOC during the riot, blamed Trump in hindsight; while his prior tweets made it exceptionally clear that he did it of his own volition. That's called trying to blame someone else to save your own ass, blame shifting.
Agree. They, of course, have their own reasons for doing this. But regardless, I feel it is a very good thing to happen.
If influential people from both parties can work together for issues like this, it will make the world a better and fairer place for the middle class and the poor.
Yes, but... they're both wrong. The trades that Robinhood blocked were objectively bad trades, and the people they stopped from buying would almost certainly have lost all that money.
Now, I agree that there's a good first principles argument (and also a bad populist one) that people should be allowed to trade their own money into scams if they want. But the idea of proving damages here based on the idea that GME was going to CONTINUE TO GO UP after a 500% increase triggered by a short squeeze is just insane, sorry.
"The trades that Robinhood blocked were objectively bad trades" Seriously? Do you want brokers making this call? That is not their job. Let people learn the hard way, that is what the markets are for. Now, don't let them do it on margin but if you're going to plow your savings into GME at $450 a share then I am sorry but it's your own fault for not doing any homework at all.
I agree that this is how it should be, but then we'll inevitably end up with a bunch morons who lost their money and then demand the government to right them. It's a lose-lose situation.
Also how do you quantify a bad trade? How much lost money? I trade on Robinhood too (not GME though), and just two weeks back I lost money on Nio stock.
Is that a bad trade? Should Robinhood have stopped me from buying that stock?
This case is not about lost damages and I doubt that is the motivation for someone like AOC getting involved. The narrative surrounding this whole thing has become the little guys have pulled one over the hedge funds and now the wall street is changing the rules. The bad trade that was done here was when GME was shorted to 140%, and now that retail has made a win, everything is being done to save the shorts. All this is highlighting for many more people in how the "game is rigged".
What about the people that already bought through Robinhood and were trying to double down to maintain their position? Those people are being made to lose money too.
Very strange, I would have expected the opposite reaction. Every time people lose money on Robinhood they blame them for not screening clients appropriately, letting them invest more than their risk tolerance, etc. This is definitely abnormal, speculative conditions (i.e. anyone who is a normal buy and hold, value, income, etc investor does not need to be entering a position on those stocks right now).
Personally, I think they should have left trading open in cash accounts, but it is completely reasonable to block purchases of high risk shares especially on margin. Same as many brokerages limit OTCs, penny stocks, F shares, etc.
If someone really wants to buy more, it only takes a few minutes to open an account with another online firm. If they hadn't allowed sales and potentially prevented someone from stopping a loss that would be a much bigger deal, but for some reason AOC specifically called this out as suspicious.
I know everyone is excited to bring out their pitchforks, but let's take a moment to consider this from an objective position.
Imagine a broker knowingly profits from executing trades that are part of a market manipulation- the SEC can and does come after them with huge fines. Usually it's years later in the unwinding of some shady hedge fund or corrupt sovereign wealth fund or pump&dump operation.
In this case, it's not a boiler room in New Jersey or a Malaysian government insider manipulating the market, it's a bunch of different people on twitter and reddit. It seems perfectly reasonable that the brokerage firms who are complicit in this have legitimate fears that the SEC will come after them later, and so are trying to limit the risk that they're deemed culpable.
I agree with Robinhood's fears on principle. What however riles up people (legitimately IMO) is that larger funds making equally suspect trades are basically let off with a slap on the wrist.
A strong argument could be made that Tesla's stocks last year have been pumped up irrationally by funds last year too, and if a market correction comes the funds behind it will face zero to minimal consequences. Same in 2008.
At the end of the day, the differential rules for individual traders and big funds riles people up.
How could they be liable though? This is a black swan, there were no risk models predicting this, Robinhood probably didn't have a policy for market manipulation done in a decentralised and diffuse way, probably because it was never done.
It's really hard to objectively defend Robinhood, it's not their job to be the gatekeeper for millions of small fish trading some peanuts. It's quite patronising.
The ironic thing is that the end result of this will probably be a ban on payment for order flow which will destroy the commission-free trading model. We’ll go back to paying $5/trade or whatever and everyone (except HFT) will ostensibly be happy.
It looks like on their pro product $1 is the minimum, so most retail trades would be $1 but not well under that. Their “lite” offering is free but subsidized by PFOF.
Thanks, you're right. I was looking at their "fixed" price structure, I wasn't aware that "tiered" was an option. You've actually changed my mind on this; eliminating PFOF wouldn't be as bad for retail customers as I initially thought.
RobinHood had to of known this was a potential outcome or they actually have the most inept management possible. I don't know how they plan on weathering this storm given how much of a public enemy they've made themselves into overnight.
I would never have thought that the political divide would be broken by reddit/discord "amateur" investors. Ted Cruz, AOC, Donald trump jr (Shame on twitter for banning Trump) ALL agree that it is probaly morally wrong to prevent amateur traders from betting against hedge funds.
Hedge funds shouldn't be bankrupted by a single loss like this. Its unacceptable. Capitalistic greed shouldn't be bailed out, the people bailing them out shouldn't have a position on the issue as well.
Objectively speaking, capitalism is quite bad for a lot of people. Might be one of the best systems we've ever came up with, it's still quite bad and needs some fixing.
