Men In Tights

It's been a while, but as predicted by the futures markets overnight, finally stock markets were green all over yesterday.

Tesla was up 15.25% on the day including after-hours trading, and the record dating back to October 16th, 2018 for overall best day in spreadsheet history was well and truly smashed exactly one week after setting a new record for the overall worst day.

March is off to a good start, unless you wanted to use your Robinhood account for trading, in which case you missed out because the app was down all day, with some reports suggesting it was due to a coding error which failed to account for the Leap Year!

It's a logical idea and a good story, but the truth may lie elsewhere.

Anyway, if you think you had a bad day, you might gain some perspective from this guy who bought put options in Amazon (a risky play in itself) and then couldn't get in to the app to close out his position:

One guy, who clearly doesn't read this blog, got caught with an open put on Tesla! A much smaller loss than the Amazon guy, but perhaps still significant as a percentage of his account. Crazy stuff.

While I do have a Robinhood account, I've never used it for trading options or stocks, and decided I never would after the company was fined in December by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority over concerns "that it didn't give its users the best deals on their trades." 

Such findings and fines are not exactly confidence filling, and what the heck someone is doing risking that sum of money on Robinhood I have no idea. That had to hurt. Yes, trades are free on Robinhood but this seems like a case of "you get what you pay for."

Reading through some of the comments and it seems that most account holders never had a backup plan. When trading money that is significant to you, whether that is hundreds or millions, it seems to me that it would be prudent to have a plan for such eventualities. Eggs in one basket anyone? 

After seeing all these losses, I'm not sure an update on going 1-1 on the NBA Totals last night will be too interesting, but life goes on.