

Ted Cruz, slammed the decision as unfair to little investors. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Republican Sen. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including Democratic Rep. In one tutorial on YouTube, a vlogger describes the app as "like Tinder, but for things that make you money." In May, the company said it has more than 13 million accounts.Īmid the recent stock market chaos, Robinhood last week disabled trading for GameStop, AMC and other companies targeted by the Reddit crowd. Using the app, traders can swipe to confirm share purchases, get notifications and read market news. The app was a pioneer in commission-free online trading with a stated mission to " democratize finance." The product was tailored to serve that ethos and appeal to people with little experience in the stock market. Robinhood, which didn't respond to a request for comment for this story, was founded in 2013 by former Stanford University roommates Baiju Bhatt and Vladmir Tenev.

"The app makes seem fun and easy, but the market is really complicated," Cheshire said. But if major hedge funds, which were the target of the r/WallStreetBets mob, can get wiped out, so can a lot of regular people. Pair the dopamine rush of a game with the herd mentality of social media - a Reddit forum called r/WallStreetBets has served as the virtual water cooler for whipping up recent activity - and it becomes apparent how a swarm of traders could push shares of an ailing video game retailer more than 800% higher than they were two weeks earlier.Ĭoye Cheshire, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, says no one knows how the situation on the stock market - which has now swept up shares of AMC, Koss and others - will play out.
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New members are given a free stock when they sign up. The service encourages transactions by showering digital confetti when trades are made. It's easy to see how novice traders like Kearns get sucked into Robinhood, which uses Silicon Valley growth-hack tactics to command user attention. "There was no intention to take this much risk." "How was a 20 year old with no income able to get assigned almost a million dollars worth of leverage?" the note read. In a suicide note, Kearns named Robinhood, asking how it allowed him to take on so much risk. In June 2020, a college student named Alexander Kearns killed himself after seeing a negative balance of more than $700,000 in his Robinhood account, though some of his trades were incomplete. Even before the run-up of GameStop and other stocks like AMC and BlackBerry elevated the fee-free service to a household name, Robinhood had been accused of downplaying the risks of stock trading, essentially presenting complex financial instruments like a game in its effort to draw in young people and new investors. Robinhood, the stock trading app at the center of the bizarre GameStop saga, has long been controversial.
