Last Wednesday options traders using Robinhood were unable to access the app and were unable to make any trades. Some traders lost a significant amount of money due to this outage. As a way to try to make up for some of these losses Robinhood is offering up to $450 in Amazon gift cards via e-mail, according to the e-mail they were targeted as a result of an evaluation done by data scientists and senior members of the Robinhood team.
I suspect what is happening in reality is that high value customers are being offered something, whereas low value/volume customers receive nothing despite any perceived or real losses. Options trading is one of the few things Robinhood makes money on. Some people also thought that the announcement of the Robinhood 3% APY account was ill timed considering the options trading downtime had only occurred a few days before. I think the announcement of that product was ill time considering the insurance they claimed would cover that account apparently won’t and they have now had to commit to a product refresh ahead of launch.
If anybody received such an e-mail from Robinhood, please share the subject line in the comments below.
Hat tip to DDG
