"you should reconsider, that's generally a good way to lose money" Some people make money off of doing this, you have no right to prevent people from day trading if that's what they want to do.
" you're probably classified as a pattern day trader, anyway, and you're already subject to a (very mild) speedbump:" This only applies if you have less than $25k in assets which most HN users probably have in excess of.
It seems like you clearly have a bias against robinhood without knowing the full reasons for why it's succeeded and how it's changed the brokerage industry for the better.
Then you still don't understand the problem. This had nothing to do with consumer margin; they could have not offered margin as a product and still ended up in this situation. The TLDR is that DTCC requires cash from the brokerage firm for buying a stock until settlement clears, which means the money you pay to buy $100 worth of apple, a percentage of that amount must be paid directly by the brokerage i.e. not from the $100 you gave but from the businesses account. During the gamestop fiasco, the percentage of money required from the brokers increased in orders of magnitude for GME and other meme stocks which caused a pseudo liquidation issue, but not actually since no one's balances were at risk yet.
It's ironic because this prevents small brokerages from building their own clearing houses and reducing competition in that space. Robinhood innovated to push the feature development cycle faster and got punished for it due to an archaic rule about settlement time. T+2 is really 99% of the reason this happened -- sure RH could have raised additional funds, but a black swan event isn't usually what a smaller bank plans for.
"you should reconsider, that's generally a good way to lose money" Some people make money off of doing this, you have no right to prevent people from day trading if that's what they want to do.
" you're probably classified as a pattern day trader, anyway, and you're already subject to a (very mild) speedbump:" This only applies if you have less than $25k in assets which most HN users probably have in excess of.
It seems like you clearly have a bias against robinhood without knowing the full reasons for why it's succeeded and how it's changed the brokerage industry for the better.