BY 20YEAROLD WHO COMMITTED SUICIDE SERIES

“These changes will take a bit of time to roll out, but our teams are hard at work,” the Robinhood co-founders said in the blog post. The startup also added additional educational resources in its help center and plans to hire an options education specialist. The company announced plans Friday to roll out improvements to its user interface, including the way buying power is displayed Robinhood said it would also make improvements to its in-app messages and emails that get sent to customers about options transactions as well as changes to the in-app history page to help users “understand the mechanics” of options trades.Īdditionally, Robinhood said it is “considering” additional criteria and education for customers that seek authorization to trade sophisticated options to help them understand how they work. Robinhood appears to be working to address this issue directly. “Why is it necessary to show a bunch of millennials that you know are signing up in droves? Why is this OK?” “Why is there no pop-up window to say this is not an actual obligation?” Brewster said. Still, Brewster questioned why Robinhood hasn’t done more to explain this issue to its mostly young users. That does not mean, however, that this is a negative balance due or debt. “That they didn’t have enough foresight to think this might happen is offensive to me,” he said.Ī source familiar with Robinhood’s procedures told CNN Business that during options trading it is possible that cash and buying power will display as negative until the other side of the trade is processed.

It was a user interface issue,” said Brewster.īrewster blamed Robinhood for simultaneously pushing its product to young traders while not putting in safeguards to prevent this kind of confusion. “My sense is that it was all over nothing. But he was apparently led to believe he did. In other words, Kearns did not actually owe $730,000.

Twitter users who saw Brewster’s stream of tweets alerted him that options traders on Robinhood sometimes see a negative cash balance until the other half of their trades are executed. “The puts I bought/sold should have cancelled out, too, but I also have no clue what I was doing now in hindsight.”Īlthough Brewster initially believed Robinhood had improperly granted Kearns vast amounts of leverage to trade with, he no longer believes that was the problem. “How was a 20-year-old with no income able to get assigned almost a million dollars’ worth of leverage?” Kearns wrote in the note that Brewster posted.

“We are personally devastated by this tragedy,” Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, Robinhood’s co-founders and co-CEOs, wrote in a blog post Friday afternoon that confirmed Kearns was a customer.īrewster shared a note on Twitter that he says Kearns left behind before he died, which indicated he was distraught and confused over his Robinhood account. Robinhood also pledged to do more to explain how these sophisticated trading strategies work.

BY 20YEAROLD WHO COMMITTED SUICIDE SERIES

On Friday, after Brewster posted a long Twitter thread about Kearns’ death, Robinhood announced a series of changes to its options offering and user interface directly in response to the incident. “This company is toxic to me right now,” he said. “How much are these guys thinking about the fire they are playing with?”īrewster, Kearns’ cousin-in-law, vowed to do whatever it takes to draw attention to what he sees as serious lapses in Robinhood’s oversight that allowed for this tragedy to happen. “The kid threw himself in front of a train over nothing, because a tech company can’t figure out they shouldn’t show a negative $730,000 cash balance to a 20-year-old kid,” Bill Brewster, a relative of Kearns, told CNN Business. The Kearns family believes Alexander was misled by the app’s interface suggesting he owed $730,000, when that was not really the case.

By 20yearold who committed suicide