Who Really Gets Rich From Robinhood (2024)

Alex Kearns started trading stocks on an app called Robinhood in 2018, two years before he threw himself in front of a moving train. The University of Nebraska sophom*ore and ROTC cadet was the only person in his family who used the app, but he had talked with his father, Dan, about it, who figured it seemed harmless enough. Alex was studying management and had gotten curious about investing as he learned more about financial markets. He’d even started chatting on the phone with a cousin, Bill Brewster, a professional investor and portfolio manager, about economics and central banking. But unbeknownst to anyone who knew him, Alex had begun trading high-risk financial instruments called options. He was at his family’s Naperville, Illinois, home when, a little before midnight, on June 11 of last year, he got a startling notification indicating he had lost $730,000. He had only about $16,000 in his account.