They Were the Villain of Dumb Money. I Hated Them Too. Until I Saw the Numbers.

A 7 min read on a name I hated ... and then didn't hate.

Cut to Robinhood HQ. Panic in the air. The market’s on fire. GameStop is ripping like it’s 1999 and everyone’s long call options with max leverage. Retail is winning. Hedge funds are bleeding.

And the folks at Robinhood? They’re not high-fiving.

They’re sweating bullets.

Vlad Tenev looks like a guy who just realized he might be running a billion-dollar margin call. He gets a call from their clearing partner. Collateral requirements have exploded overnight. They don’t have the cash. Not enough to clear the trades. Not enough to keep the machine running.

The firm’s on the hook. The message is clear: pause the madness or go bust.

So what do they do?

They shut it down.

Not “halt trading” like the NYSE. Not “implement a risk throttle.” No. They literally remove the buy button for GameStop, AMC, Blackberry, Nokia. Any stock with meme blood in it.

You could sell. But you couldn’t buy.

Retail is furious. Reddit melts down. Twitter explodes. The vibe? Betrayal. Feels like the game was fair… until the players started winning. Then the house changed the rules.

Back in Robinhood HQ, Vlad’s staring at his phone like it might spontaneously combust. He’s on the phone with Citadel. The clearing house. Lawyers. PR. Congress is calling. The app store reviews are tanking.

In the movie, it’s chaos. In real life, it was worse.

That one decision to remove the buy button turned Robinhood from the darling of retail into the poster child for rigged markets. They said they were democratizing finance. That day, it looked a hell of a lot like they were protecting the Kenny G and Steve Cohen.

And it stuck.

The movie captured the absolute chaos of the GameStop saga, and yeah, Robinhood came off looking like the villain they deserved to be. A trading app that shut down buying when things got hot? Selling client order flow under the illusion of "free" trades? It was the house rigging the game and handing retail the dice.

I hated them. Maybe I still do. It tatined my view of them for a long time.

But here’s the thing: sometimes something you hate might actually make you money. You gotta take the bias off. You gotta see things clearly.

So premium members let’s dig in.

Oh … and before I forget. Yes a big congrats to COOP shareholders on the RKT acquistion. I wrote about this back in the fall and if you followed along, congrats.