[BoorishBears]

People keep saying this and all I can say is, have you used Robinhood AND a "real" brokrage platform?

Crashes during periods of high volatility at a much higher rate than competitors, puts detailed views of stock market behind a paywall, actively advertises options with asinine strike/expiries for people who don't get options, no full support for spreads are on their mobile app, their general poor handling of multi leg options strategies resulted in the suicide of person wrongly shown to owe millions in their account, terrible for tracking P/L, terrible fills on orders, the asinine fake chat bot system and lacking support in general

Robinhood as a trading platform is deeply flawed, you say your commissions would outweigh your investments, but a) now zero fee trades is not a differentiator, and b) you're paying commissions on every RH trade with subpar fills, both on time taken to fill and prices, those add up over time, and are why RH could even afford commission free trades in the first place

[kjksf]

Yes, I do use IBKR, which is one the "real" brokerage platforms.

Your portrayal of RobinHood is a caricature.

Crashes? It happened a few times. I'm not an active trader, so I don't use IBKR all the time, but even in my light usage when I couldn't log in because their security-theater activation code never arrives.

Often IBKR can't show the value of my portfolio because, apparently, they can't load the data.

The whole web app is slow, switching between different parts is slow.

They don't even bother to send you an e-mail immediately after fulfilling the order.

The way RobinHood show option pricing makes way more sense than IBKR's view.

"Terrible fills on order" - you're just making stuff up. Care to show evidence that some other brokerage can fill your order faster or at better price than RobinHood.

"IB's trading system had a defect that prevented clients from selling any WTI Futures at negative prices, which caused IB's clients over $100 million in losses." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sadis-hired-investigate-inter...

I'm sure there were people who lost money and committed suicide and were customers of "real" brokerage platforms.

RobinHood is just a better app. Why do people think it's a bad thing is beyond me.

[BoorishBears]

> I'm sure there were people who lost money and committed suicide and were customers of "real" brokerage platforms.

Let's start with the suicide because that alone should have been the end of Robinhood...

This person did NOT lose their money.

Normally to sell an option you need the underlying equity (unless you're selling naked options, but RH won't let you do that)

A spread is when you use options to get the right to buy the underlying equity on a given day, then use that to sell an option on the same day.

So your sold option is covered by your bought option

Robinhood erroneously disregarded the option the person had bought, and told them they were on the hook for millions of dollars worth of shares. They had no access to leverage that would have let them owe that much money.

They committed suicide not because they lost their money, but because they thought they owed millions on an account worth hundreds...

THIS IS STILL A BUG! Someone killed themselves over this, and this is literally still happening!

-

The rest of your complaints are either off base, or just deflections unrelated to things I said

Like, no one is complaining RH having a good UI is a bad thing, come off that.

RH sends emails for orders, I'm guessing you turned it off because you felt they were "asking for your life story"

RH's fills are legendarily bad, I'm sorry I can't do a research study for you, but you're free to search this yourself

If we're just trading bug stories, are we going to ignore RH has completely broken two leap years in a row? I mean I don't want to stoop to that, that's why I specifically mentioned a scenario where it keeps happening, periods of high volatility

All platforms strain doing those, but RH keeps breaking in the same ways, and it doesn't seem to phase them

Your portfolio value example is actually my favorite...

IB gets that your portfolio value could have an effect on your trading habits and mental state... so it doesn't load a value

Robinhood every single period of increased volatility will start showing randomly wrong amounts for my portfolio value!

There've been times when I sold out of positions because RH showed portfolio wide losses only for me to realize it was literally making up a number...

Imagine what happens if it shows you owing millions of dollars

-

Robinhood's option views deserve their own article.

Do you mean "Discover" where they show you those asinine positions (asinine even for a Yolo mind you, some of them have no volume or open interest, so even if the spike by some miracle, you can't even sell)

Or the normal view where the most important information, like Volume and the Greeks is buried under a sub heading?

Or the mobile app, which previously won't let you do spreads outside the discover view, and still randomly doesn't show spreads for some tickers for those using the Discover view

Not to mention the insanity that the "Discover" view exists. Because it shows strike expiry but doesn't explain that if there's no Volume that doesn't matter, doesn't explain Theta

Now before you complain "That's just sandbagging people who want to trade options!!!"

This is stuff you can literally explain in 2 sentences! "The closer to expiring this option we're showing you is, the less it's worth" and "Volume and Open Interest represent if anyone will actually buy this thing we saddled you with before expiry"

IB is showing you all this annoying stuff to sandbag you that just happens to actually be incredibly simple if you take 10 minutes to look it up.

Now if we were talking about using a new OS I'd be totally with all the people saying "wow they want you to read an instruction manual, crappy UX"

But here it's your actual money, and 10 minutes really is 10 minutes to learn stuff that exists no matter what platform you use.

[QuesnayJr]

  options with asinine strike/expiries for people who don't get options

I've never used Robinhood, so I was curious what you meant by an "asinine" strike. (I know all about options, FWIW.)

[BoorishBears]

Stuff that's just so insanely out of the money, and so close to expiry, that even by "YOLO" standards, it's stupid.

You usually get burned right off the bat because the bid/ask spread is huge, so to even get the order filled, you need a limit order with a really unfavorable price

[QuesnayJr]

Thanks. That makes sense.