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by swampthing 1968 days ago
That is the narrative that the mob would like you to believe, but it's actually not true. Here are some examples of that happening in the past:

* https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUKKCN2253T2 * https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1FT2S4

Robinhood was in a no-win situation. You can read about why they were forced to restrict buying here: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/01/elon-musk-on-clubhouse-robin...

If they restricted sells too, they would have been lambasted, likely even more than they currently are, by people trying to get out of their positions either to capture gains or avoid loss.

Robinhood's only move was to mitigate the fall-out with customers through messaging, which they failed miserably at. It's unclear to me whether this failure was due to incompetence or because they were (or thought they were) restricted from providing certain information by law or contract.

1 comments

Those other cases seem fairly obscure, prevented people from buying plummeting assets, and might not have been so defensible themselves. The reason cited was to protect foolish small investors. This is fundamentally a different thing than intentionally damping the rise of a security that has been up over 100% for nearly a week. That didn't protect any small investors. Whom did it protect?

Somehow I doubt perjury attaches to an untranscripted chat on a celebrity-only private audio app. Everything at that third link seems highly lawyered: "From our perspective", "I wouldn’t impute", passive voice, etc. From a guy named "Vlad" who looks like Dracula. I guess it was just prejudice that caused me to expect someone from Sherwood...

> That didn't protect any small investors. Whom did it protect?

This question is irrelevant in the case of Robinhood, because they had no choice. It seems like that is also fundamentally why they didn't restrict selling — because they wren't required to, whereas they were required to restrict buying. I.e. they imposed the minimum necessary restrictions. This is exactly what you would want from someone in Robinhood's position. You don't want them making their own decisions about who can buy or sell.

> Somehow I doubt perjury attaches to an untranscripted chat on a celebrity-only private audio app. Everything at that third link seems highly lawyered: "From our perspective", "I wouldn’t impute", passive voice, etc.

If something was highly lawyered, do you really think they would go with a lie that would be this easy to disprove? I.e. a lie that relies on people with no interest in Robinhood to uphold it?

> From a guy named "Vlad" who looks like Dracula. I guess it was just prejudice that caused me to expect someone from Sherwood...

I don't know that it makes sense to base whether or not you believe him on things he has no control over.