“ If we had had a lot more wiggle room, we probably would have let things go on, ” Robinhood’s Tenev told Dave Portnoy

The interview began with the man who calls himself Davey Day Trader asking a Tenev wearing a Taco Tuesday hat if he knew everyone hated his guts because Robinhood’s decision to restrict trading in GameStop effectively ended the short-lived momentum of this trade. Tenev was asked about the gap between his stint on CNBC and his refusal to have a liquidity problem, then revealed in an interview days later that the brokerage was facing a 3 billion margin call. dollars at 3 a.m.

Tenev said it was not, as Portnoy described it, a 180 degree change. “Reduce it to a liquidity problem of both overselling and underselling it simultaneously,” he said. Tenev said Robinhood was not the only company limiting the business of video game retailer GameStop, of the AMC Entertainment movie chain AMC,
+ 17.56%,
and other popular actions, calling it a “systemic problem”.

When asked bluntly if Robinhood would have regulated the trading of GameStop and other popular Reddit stocks without the 3 a.m. phone call, Tenev admitted they hadn’t. “If we had had a lot more leeway, we probably would have let things go on,” he said. And Tenev admitted the company would have faced a liquidity problem – the next day – if it had not acted. Defending his interview with CNBC, Tenev said he was “running on smoke” as he scrambled to raise $ 3.4 billion in capital for unrestricted trade.

Portnoy also asked Tenev if Robinhood should have restricted selling and buying – so as not to crunch shares – to which Tenev replied that margin requirements would not have been helped by limiting sales.

You watch the whole interview here.

CNBC star Jim Cramer shared his take on the interview.