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points by JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | 0 comments
> FINRA statistics

Sure. What are you looking at?

> common sense

There's your problem.

> real world experience with options trading

Did you ever take anything to arbitration?

For what it's worth, former options market maker here.

[–] weird-eye-issue 4 days ago
https://www.finra.org/arbitration-mediation/dispute-resoluti...

The number seems very small compared to the sheer number of retail investors that lose money on options and a lot of these don't even go in favor of the complaintant either.

Just to clarify I'm not talking about somebody doing some sort of complex options play that ends them up in debt when they are 17 years old or something like that.

I'm talking about the average case where somebody signs up for a brokerage account, funds the account, accepts the disclaimers and fills out the questionnaire to do options, is approved for level one, buys some call options, and they all go to zero. Why should they get their money back?

[–] JumpCrisscross 4 days ago
> number seems very small compared to the sheer number of retail investors that lose money on options and a lot of these don't even go in favor of the complaintant either

Most retail investors don't complain. And most brokerages settle before going to arbitration, because the win rates aren't great and either way it winds up on your record.

> I'm not talking about somebody doing some sort of complex options play

Those are actually more likely to go against the investor. Someone making an over-leveraged nonsense play is more sympathetic. (Or, investor was an idiot but broker failed to file a trade report on time or sent a stupid text or whatever.)

> Why should they get their money back?

Big question. Simpler: they do. A quarter to a third of cases between '21 and '26 resulted in customer awards, per your source.

[–] weird-eye-issue 4 days ago
> Simpler: they do. A quarter to a third of cases between '21 and '26 resulted in customer awards, per your source.

Right, only a quarter, and that is just any award, it could be 10% of what they lost

[–] JumpCrisscross 4 days ago
> only a quarter, and that is just any award, it could be 10% of what they lost

Sure. It’s still (a) a huge pain in the ass for the broker and (b) more than anyone will get from Kalshi.