Infinite leverage: RH is likely in some regulatory heat now, but my bet is that the users who took advantage of the glitch are as well. Regulations around margin and how much you can take are very clear. This isn't like a glitch in a video game. This has real consequences, including manipulating the markets of securities bought with the infinite leverage. The broker dealer, RH in this case, normally builds the margin rules into the trading platform so that it's impossible for the investor to break them. Now that they've been broken, and the users were bragging about breaking them, I doubt they will be ignored. The people who lost $60k might actually be the lucky ones, maybe they will get to fly under the radar. The person who made $1,000,000+ using this glitch will probably be the one the SEC makes an example of.
This had me slightly worried as a RH user (I'm not trading a lot of money there, and definitely not margin trading), but then I came across this explanation on the Reddit thread cited by OP.
Many other brokerage firms now offer $0 commissions. That was RH's main selling point.
Charles Schwab VS Robinhood, assuming fees are the same: One is tiny and looks to be in for a rough round of legal problems. They really really screwed up something every major investment firm did without issue, allowing margin. They also recently had a hard time setting up a banking account, which shouldn't be hard, but they managed to screw that up too. Schwab on the other hand is massive, already has bank accounts, has had margin for years(decades?), stays out of legal problems, and even if something like this happened they have the cash and infrastructure to fix it and eat the legal expense. The very fact that this went on(is still going on?) for so long before RH fixed it is a very bad sign. For me this is an easy decision, go to Schwab(or Fidelity, TD, etc.).
Suppose a glitch occurred that was not in the investor's favor? How hard would it be to convince your brokerage that their computer did the math wrong?
Examples:
....
I'm 99.99% sure all of these examples have happened in real life. Investment firms have well defined research processes for this sort of thing, and if was their fault they refund the client. There are also regulations defining how quickly they respond to such an event and spelling out the consequences if they don't. Now I'm referring to the big players, like Vanguard, Schwab, Fidelity, etc. Robinhood? The fact that this went on this long tells me they are in a bad spot and trying to play catch up.