settlement is a necessary but undesirable part of the business of a brokerage, because it locks up capital, which is costly, for a business model whose margins are shrinking rapidly. it used to be that brokerages could earn something from the overnight repo on the balance sheet in order to compete aggressively on fees but nowadays overnight rates are so low and zero-cost execution is the cat let out of the bag. maybe prime brokerages can comfortably rely on the bank's overall B/S to manage this risk but specialist and retail brokerages are all aggressively shrinking capital to stay competitive at the cost of not doing business on days like these. how much is robinhood paying for drawing down those credit lines over the last week just to tide over the 2-day mismatch in trading and settlement? how close was it to getting stopped on doing business in all the other tickers that aren't GME and AMC? I honestly think robinhood would rather not have done that wsb business at all.