20-Year-Old Robinhood Customer Commits Suicide After Seeing A $730,000 Negative Balance

[vanzandt]

He should have called customer service to understand what was going on in his account.

That's the first thing I thought too, but who knows, maybe he did. I bet RH's hold time on the phone is off the charts with all these new players.

 

[newwurldmn]

right.

I am sure there are other brokers with poor security / safety feature.
something must be done to eliminate such brokers.

I would wager there is no securities brokerage firm that has these same problems.

 

[themickey]

He should have called customer service to understand what was going on in his account.

There appears to be no phone number.
https://robinhood.com/contact

 

[Renzo]

He was leveraged. The idiots at RH allowed the credit balance from the bull put vert to be utilized. Essentially negative haircut for ITM credits. The family should sue these idiots into ch7.

The kid knew what the correct req was and yet still leveraged up. Sorry, I have no tears.

I don't understand your post. You have no tears for who? The poor kid or Robinhood? I have tears for the kid. I'm sorry that happened. However, it's not the brokerages fault he committed suicide. I don't contemplate suicide every time I see a glitch in my machine. He killed himself because he was sick and someone should've noticed. The outcome had nothing to do with money. He would've killed himself if he'd stubbed his toe on the coffee table. Clinical depression will do that to you.

I also disagree that RH should be sued. Mistakes happen and this is a relatively benign glitch an email to CS would've wrapped right up.

 

[newwurldmn]

There appears to be no phone number.
https://robinhood.com/contact

No other securities brokerage firm doesn’t have a phone number to call.

 

[Cuddles]

He should have called customer service to understand what was going on in his account.

These are millenials we're talking about, you may as well have asked him to commit suicide.

 

[Alexpung]

Err, why wouldn't they just liquidate the trade when margin was exceeded?!

According to the screenshot in the twitter link, the trader mis-read the UI thinking that he lose 700k but actually this is just the negative cash for being assigned the AMZN stock.

He still have 16k equity in the screenshot.

 

[SanMiguel]

According to the screenshot in the twitter link, the trader mis-read the UI thinking that he lose 700k but actually this is just the negative cash for being assigned the AMZN stock.

He still have 16k equity in the screenshot.

I don't understand how that is possible. For that to happen the price of the option would be so high that it would have been liquidated.

 

[Alexpung]

I don't understand how that is possible. For that to happen the price of the option would be so high that it would have been liquidated.

You get assigned 300 Amazon stock @2500 and this is already negative 750k cash. The price of the option is not really relevant but the strike price * number of contracts * 100. If the option is exactly at the money, for example, it is near worthless but you still need a crapton of cash to satisfy your option obligation.

Just that the 300 Amazon stock you receive will cancel out the negative cash or in this case he have a spread, so either the other leg is out of money or the app didn't show the impact of exercising the other leg.

 

[maxinger]

I would wager there is no securities brokerage firm that has these same problems.

That is interesting.

I am trying to download Robinhood android apps but it seems that it is not available for download.
I want to see how Robinhood do the fanstastic marketing job and attract millions of newbie traders.