What are peoples' thoughts on the clearing house excuse? Personally, it's a lot of brokers to pull the same stunt at the same time, but it seems more logical from an individual broker perspective.
So, another angle: Someone on twitter - wasn't Danielle DiMartino Booth - quipped "this shit doesn't happen at $6.95 a trade." Looking at it a little deeper: retail brokerages used to make their money by charging to execute the trades. This made "trading" a profitable activity for them. Robinhood broke the shit out of that because their profits come from payment for order flow. Which is basically front-running but legal. Except in this case Robinhood is pimping out its users, rather than using the order flow itself, all of which is legal, but none of which has any-fucking-thing to do with the basic principle of buy low, sell high. Much like Parler isn't actually a world-class server-side app but a janky-ass wordpress skin, it looks as if Robinhood et. al. aren't actually trading apps, they're front-ends to market makers whose terms of service Robinhood users have absolutely no engagement with. So one way to look at this is Robinhood has been pretending to be a player, then Robinhood's actual clients said "we're not doing this shit" and Robinhood had to pretend to be a player while not being allowed to play.