Paramount Pictures
- Traders have been exploiting a glitch in Robinhood's app to trade with a limitless supply of borrowed cash, and one online forum member compiled a hall-of-fame list for the largest positions created through the bug.
- One member of the WallStreetBets sub-reddit discovered the glitch in late October. Several other users subsequently copied the trade, boasting increasingly large sums of borrowed cash on the forum.
- Here are the five hall-of-fame members, from the user who first traded with the bug to one member who turned a $3,000 deposit into a $1.7 million position.
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
Traders have been using a glitch in Robinhood's app to trade with an unlimited supply of borrowed cash - and one member of an online forum compiled a hall-of-fame list of the largest positions created through the bug.
A member of the WallStreetBets sub-reddit discovered the glitch in late October after using a $2,000 deposit to trade with $50,000 in buying power. Other forum members glorified the trade before executing similar trades. In a matter of days, users were one-upping each other to see who could amass the most borrowed cash.
The trade involves Robinhood Gold users selling call options with money borrowed through the platform, also known as "leverage." The app incorrectly added the value of the options sold to traders' cash pile, giving them more buying power with which to repeat the trade.
One WallStreetBets user described the trick as an "infinite money cheat code," though it's uncertain what action, if any, will be taken against the traders for their high-risk activity.
One forum member, curiously named SocioButt, posted a list highlighting members who gambled the most through the exploit. Here are the five hall-of-fame members, from the user who first found the glitch to one who turned a $3,000 deposit into a $1.7 million position.
The Reddit posts are sorted by Eastern Standard Time.