Hard to judge to what extent he was nudged by Robinhood's marketing and UI towards risk-taking vs. initially predisposed. I agree that most other brokerages all

Hard to judge to what extent he was nudged by Robinhood's marketing and UI towards risk-taking vs. initially predisposed. I agree that most other brokerages allow--and often even encourage, just less effectively--their customers to take similar risks. The difference is just that Robinhood seems unusually good at the "encouraging", with UI frills like the confetti and such, and their customers do anecdotally seem unusually prone to blowing up. I'd re-emphasize my point as to your opponent's skill. Poker (or most other games of combined chance and skill) gives you an opportunity to practice both at lower stakes and against less skilled opponents. In the public markets, you can risk as little as you want, but you're always playing against the world's best counterparties, unless you can find some instrument that's both too small to be worth the professionals' specific attention and too distinctive for their existing algorithms to generalize.