The Robinhood brokerage application, particularly popular with amateur traders during the recent surge in certain titles such as GameStop, confirmed this Friday that it was the subject of requests from several authorities for its role in this affair.
Read also: GameStop, the phenomenon that turns Wall Street upside down
The company has been vilified by many users for restricting stock and option purchases of several companies targeted by the speculative fever that gripped Wall Street last month.
Robinhood claims to have decided to restrict trade due to
"unprecedented volatility"
and to meet the capital levels required by clearing houses to complete stock market transactions.
In a document sent on Friday to the financial markets authority, the SEC, the platform said that several organizations had requested information on the matter, including the offices of the California Department of Justice, the SEC, the authority Financial Regulatory Authority, the offices of attorneys general of several states, as well as Congress.
Robinhood boss Vlad Tenev has already attended a House of Representatives Financial Services Commission hearing on the subject in mid-February.
The group also identified 46 collective complaints as well as three individual complaints against it in this story.
Robinhood tries to solve two more cases
A movement of panic seized the New York Stock Exchange when an army of amateur investors, trading in particular on a forum on the Reddit site, had invested heavily in several companies in faltering financial health, including the chain of game stores GameStop video.
In particular, they wanted to prove the big hedge funds wrong, which had bet on a stock market collapse of these companies.
Read also: Wall Street bubble: why the GameStop revolt is not a class struggle in finance
Robinhood has also indicated that it is in negotiations with Finra to try to resolve two other cases: the outages that affected the platform in early March 2020, when the stock markets were in complete collapse, and the methods used by the platform to present to its users the money they have in their account and to approve those authorized to buy and sell options.
The family of a young man who committed suicide in June 2020 when he was convinced he had suffered very large losses on the brokerage site filed a complaint in early February against Robinhood.
