Robinhood stock “refunds”

Stocks go up. Stocks go down. No one can explain this. Someone wise (read, a Reddit user) once told me this.

People have dedicated their lives to trying to understand or game the market. Some have won (to an extent) and others have failed miserably. I had fun trading derivatives during the pandemic, but now I mainly buy boring index funds. It’s less mentally taxing and while you lose money in the long term, it theoretically does decent on a long enough timescale. Who knows though.

This got me thinking about the current fiscal environment and how much stocks have been tanking the past few weeks. It’s a wake up call after 10 years of uncharacteristically good returns when juxtaposed against the broader market.

For people who have been aping into different stocks on Robinhood, what if there was a way to try and get a “refund” when you make a bad investment decision? Yes, this would essentially ruin the underlying mechanics of investing, but it’s an interesting idea as “training wheels” for people who are relatively new to investing.

Do I think you should be able to return stocks after buying them? No. Do I think there’s something to be said for thoughtfully de-risking for new investors to get familiar with the basics? Yes. Is this the way to do it? Probably not, but it’s a start.

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