To better understand why Robinhood is so popular among millennial investors, it’s best to think about game design. The Robinhood stock trading app feels and plays very much like a video game, but of course, it’s a stock-trading game. The ‘in-game’ purchases are equities and options of real publicly traded companies.
During the pandemic, the platform erupted with young inexperienced traders, who could approve themselves on the app as ultra-sophisticated traders with the touch of a button. To date, Robinhood has close to 20 million users.
As we sadly detailed here, the devastating suicide of 20-year-old Alex Kearns last June, after discovering he faced a loss of over $700k on his massively-levered options account, exposed the very real downside of the speculative mania in the stock market.
I don’t get involved with things I don’t understand. This kid was playing on the computer like so many, thinking it was a game.
Oh well. Thought he was a big boy but got proven wrong.