For those in the software industry, we would say the Robinhood app has a "poor UX" for poor user experience. It sounds like a design problem that led to a gross misunderstanding. It is such an unnecessary tragedy.
20-Year-Old Robinhood Customer Commits Suicide After Seeing A $730,000 Negative Balance
- Thread starter ajacobson
- Start date
Speaking from experience with clients - Discount Brokers don’t know WTF they’re doing with spreads. I’ve been doing client work for twelve years and every client who comes to me with a DB account ends up dumping them because their Risk Systems simply aren’t set up to margin spreads and calculate offsets correctly.
There is not one DB I can recommend without reservation for spread traders.
It does you no good to save $2 / RT when they margin each leg as outright risk intraday on exchange recognized and supported spreads.
I had a new client clearing a DB who was adamant about keeping them. He put on 2 Fives versus 1 Ten and his DB margined him somewhere around $5500 intraday as I recall. Keeping him on the Skype chat I legged into the same spread on my Advantage account and they margined me $500 intraday - which was still a tad high but Advantage uses a shortcut to calculate intraday spread margins super fast.
He changed.
There is not one DB I can recommend without reservation for spread traders.
It does you no good to save $2 / RT when they margin each leg as outright risk intraday on exchange recognized and supported spreads.
I had a new client clearing a DB who was adamant about keeping them. He put on 2 Fives versus 1 Ten and his DB margined him somewhere around $5500 intraday as I recall. Keeping him on the Skype chat I legged into the same spread on my Advantage account and they margined me $500 intraday - which was still a tad high but Advantage uses a shortcut to calculate intraday spread margins super fast.
He changed.
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Boo hoo. Life isn’t fair. I didn’t make 100percent this week. I’m going to kill myself.
I think he was referring to the fact that Millennial's abhor talking to someone on the phone.
Ouch. Damn. & Sad.
What a blind spot. Just because i wouldn't do so, doesn't that others won't. Kudos to government, after all.
Link?
It's bullshit. In regards to the 2009 crash, I found this article on CNN Money, saying that there were extra suicides in Japan. But Japan is known for working its employees to death anyway.
The PDT rule is stupid and doesn't protect anyone except the broker. You don't borrow too much on margin and the broker remains insured losing only small increments. While I'm all for not being allowed to borrow, the PDT rule could've been better served if margin was simply pushed up to $25k rather than limiting the number of trades.
What a sad story. A bit odd that he didn't further research his options (no pun intended) first. Even if he was 730K in debt there must have been a solution. I guess he panicked completely and possibly was a person susceptible to do such a thing in the first place.
There's been a few suicides in my social circle over the years. A bit too many. A few of them were not total surprises, but most of them nobody saw coming. The most recent one was the guy who was always happy and joking around. Had a really nice girlfriend, friends and everything just seemed great, but one day he takes an early exit and everyone's shocked as to why. No apparent trigger. No warning.
There's been a few suicides in my social circle over the years. A bit too many. A few of them were not total surprises, but most of them nobody saw coming. The most recent one was the guy who was always happy and joking around. Had a really nice girlfriend, friends and everything just seemed great, but one day he takes an early exit and everyone's shocked as to why. No apparent trigger. No warning.
Yeah it is called personal bankruptcy. At 20 he probably didn't have too many things to his name or much less than 730K, so suicide was an over reaction, probably based on depression. At minimum he should have called them first or ask an option pro how this could have been possible?
Hell, had he posted here a question, we would have told him not to worry. The life saving power of ET information.....