Is it just me, or does it feel like the only people using Robinhood are college students gambling with their parent's money?
Given that many extremely smart people who have devoted their lives to the stock market cannot beat average returns, the lack of Robinhood user's knowledge of "pin risk" seems to miss the greater point.
1) Somewhat pedantic: A big reason why performance is-what-it-is is that at any real $$$ liquidity/volume becomes an issue. Lots of option markets are just not that liquid. If you play with only a few $k and robinhood pays for much of market friction then you can potentially outperform market at risk parity.
2) More real: For most people active trading is not about investing, it is about easy and legal gambling. There is a thrill of throwing you money into high risk options or skyrocketing meme-stocks. Because markets are (relatively) efficient the prices of these assets usually reflect their risk profile, so on average you should gain money (flip side of it being hard to beat market is that it is hard to severely underperform, on average, as long as you don't all-in; normally friction cost makes these kind of strategies not work but RH reduces that significantly). It ends up like going to a casino where on average you make a bit of money (but with high volatility means some people lose a lot, some people gain a lot).
Is it just me, or does it feel like the only people using Robinhood are college students gambling with their parent's money?
Given that many extremely smart people who have devoted their lives to the stock market cannot beat average returns, the lack of Robinhood user's knowledge of "pin risk" seems to miss the greater point.