As casinos and sports shut down in the name of Covid, the world’s gamblers naturally turn to the only thing they can bet on. Stonks. People like Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, in the wake of sports pausing, re-fashioned himself to Davey Day Trader, and started trading stocks and buying up airlines at the bottom of the market in March. Trading platform Robinhood reported an increase of 3 million users in 2020 alone, and pushed total users up to 13 million. Are these new traders on Robinhood actually gamblers with itchy hands?
What happens when a bunch of retail investors, stuck at home frustrated with nothing to do, goes on Robinhood? Death, apparently. A 20 year old Robinhood customer committed suicide after seeing his account with a negative $730,000 balance. The real bummer is, he didn’t even have losses amounting to that much, and it was simply a matter of the UI having updated one trade but not the other in a straddle options trade....