The real answer is they shut off buying and selling at critical times more than any other broker, they give you an hour less in a day to exercise options and their app is designed to get you to constantly be buying and selling because they make money on selling your trade before they make it for you, greatly increasing your odds of losing your money.
I agree they are awful. But isn’t the buy / sell thing more to do with how they don’t want to pay top price for the connection to next set of brokerage to complete this so if there are loads of trades they can’t go through to the actual firm they use. Rather than a super malice act by them seemed like it was the next one that dried them up. And Robinhood to keep costs low don’t want to pay more to have a better connection with them. This may all he wrong I saw the HBO GameStop doc with Kieran Culkin but was high at the time so this is vaguely what I remember.
Its both, they don't want to pay for extra features and they also get paid to sell your trade before you make it, so that if an algo sees everyone's about to dump a stock, they sell first, getting the better price. It's called payment for order flow.
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u/WheelerDan Aug 17 '24
The real answer is they shut off buying and selling at critical times more than any other broker, they give you an hour less in a day to exercise options and their app is designed to get you to constantly be buying and selling because they make money on selling your trade before they make it for you, greatly increasing your odds of losing your money.