We have so many sources, from multiple brokerages, about increased capital requirements to clear GME and AMC trades that it has revived discussions about whether there are bad unintended consequences of the Dodd-Frank regulations that centralized clearing, which have the impact of transmuting private company risk management policies (that protect systemically important firms like DTCC) into global financial policy. But you've managed to dismiss all this as "hot air", thus, I would suggest, confirming my suggestion that Very Online People simply don't accept the fairly clear explanation of what happened.
It seems reasonable to fault Robinhood for shitty comms (though, as 'JumpCrisscross pointed out yesterday, the general rule is "aviate, navigate, then communicate"), but the endemic message board pathology is to use shitty comms to justify conspiracy theories, which are more fun to talk about than reality and take over these threads like algae.
Everybody here correctly divined what you mention, and then could confirm it after other trading apps went on to actually shed some light towards what's going on.
My point is exactly the shitty comms of Robin Hood - they were the first to make this move, they gave no reasonable explanation. It doesn't matter what we know now. What matters is that RH's users didn't know then.
In light of this comment I can't really understand what you meant by the last paragraph of your last comment. Were you actually asking? Or did you know, and know that RH's answers to those questions were in fact not nefarious, and just want to keep the drama alive a bit longer?
I get the high-level picture, I'm somewhat unclear about the details, and I'm not sure iff this even applies to Robin Hood, because they didn't confirm any of this. That's all irrelevant, though.
The top-level question here was, why people are angry at Robin Hood. My explanation is simple: they cut a lot of people off buying at the moment they wanted to buy, and provided no explanation. Any theory as to why they did that comes from taking explanations of other traders and the mechanics, not from anything RH said.
If you think what they published was sufficient explanation (and remember, the target audience is mostly regular folks with even less clue about stock market than I have), then why did RH's CEO get drilled by the news on the same questions I'm listing? Apparently the newscasters and their audiences also don't believe he answered anything.
Second: I'm not interested in the binary of whether or not people are mad at Robinhood. People should be mad at Robinhood for a variety of reasons, most notably that it is an online casino masquerading as an investment app.
I am very interested in the conspiracy theory that says Robinhood halted GME orders as part of an effort to protect hedge funds. That conspiracy was repeated by a number of legislators yesterday, seemingly encouraging ordinary people to follow on this terribly risky GME bubble. The conspiracy appears to be false.
Alright, so we were talking past each other. Sorry for not picking up on it sooner.
I don't subscribe to the conspiracy theory - the "mundane", mechanical explanation seems perfectly adequate. My only opinion on Robinhood is that the current backlash they face could've been avoided if they were communicating honestly and in details. The angry mob ultimately isn't after them.
It seems reasonable to fault Robinhood for shitty comms (though, as 'JumpCrisscross pointed out yesterday, the general rule is "aviate, navigate, then communicate"), but the endemic message board pathology is to use shitty comms to justify conspiracy theories, which are more fun to talk about than reality and take over these threads like algae.