Playing the Game of Infinite Leverage

Robinhood Markets Inc. is a discount brokerage that allows customers to trade stocks and options, with zero commissions, on their phones. We have talked about Robinhood in the past when we discussed brokerage-y topics like zero commissions and payment for order flow.

But you can also analyze Robinhood as a mobile gaming company. It makes an app that you can download to your phone, and then you can play a game on the app. As with many mobile games, there are in-app purchases, and you can end up spending a lot of money on the Robinhood game. The game is of course a stock-trading game. The purchases are stocks. You win by getting a lot of money. But there are other ways to play. Some people aren’t interested in playing the game as its designers intended. They want to hack the game, to find weird glitches and exploits, to take the game apart and build their own weird levels, to stream the resulting monstrosities to entertain their friends.