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Robinhood launches 3% checking account

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Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#331
post #102

For those not aware of it: ton of people lost money yesterday because RH options trading system shat itself. I wouldn't trust them with my beer money https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/a5iwgh/robi...

Robinhood definitely had down time yesterday, but I'd like to make a note that /r/Robinhood overreacts to things like crazy. I'm pretty sure 95% of the people in there are under 20 and daytrading options with less than $5000. I'm bringing this up because, while some people did lose money yesterday because of Robinhood's downtime, there we also a lot of people claiming to have lost money, but were blatantly lying. I'm…

Wouldn't you need 25k in your account to day trade options without being caught up as a RH pattern day trader?

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#332
I just spent 3 months in London, and it's crazy how Monzo seems to have taken the market. Almost everybody seems to be paying with a Monzo card, regardless of age.

Asking around, I consistently heard that Monzo's competitors like Revolut are going to be a future case study in scaling before great product/market fit. I don't know how many people have Revolut accounts, but nobody seems to be using their cards in public.

Little details really add up. For instance, Revolut didn't have contactless support for a while, which meant people could not use it on the Tube. Monzo made their cards pink, which creates a physical network effect.

The US seems to have a wave of startups trying to reinvent checking accounts right now. I wonder which, if any, will take the market:

- Varo (https://varomoney.com) - Product and brand don't look very polished and they haven't launched Android support, but they are doing the "hard thing" of getting a bank charter (rather than having a partner bank, like all of the others).

- Robinhood (https://robinhood.com) - Already offers investment products, so they can get a lot of users quickly. Unclear how good the product will be. (For example - can they support contactless payments with a clear card?)

- Chime (https://chimebank.com) - Seems to have the most mature and polished product. The killer feature they advertise is "get direct deposits faster", which doesn't seem world-changing to me.

My benchmark is Charles Schwab Bank, which offers no fees on any ATM, anywhere. It's what many millennials that I know use. But, it's a bad product and not very user-friendly. Simple tried to reinvent banking, but they never seemed to go beyond polishing the UI. I'm curious to see what the future holds, particularly as some foreign banks expand to the USA!

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SEC and FINRA (regulatory agencies) don't allow day trading for accounts with balances less than $25,000. If you exceed 3 (?) day trades in the past 5 days, your account is locked from day trading for 90 days (so if you buy a stock you will be unable to sell it that day). All exchanges enforce this rule, not just Robinhood.

I hope this gets challenged in court at some point. The rules went into effect on September 28, 2001 as a knee-jerk reaction to the dot bomb and 9/11: http://www.finra.org/investors/day-trading-margin-requiremen... The real story is that the plebes realized they could make 2% per day by day trading and selling short. I did this with my dad and we were up about $40k before 9/11 wiped out most people's gains (this was…

Uh, no. The average person can't make 2% per day by day trading. What a ridiculous claim. If that were true, financial firms would hire average people to run their mutual funds and beat their current performance tenfold.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#334
post #104

This is massive news. Banks are going to have to decide whether they want to raise their rates to compete, or face bleeding customers. The best part is that the money comes from merchants and credit card companies, and is being returned to consumers. Robinhood truly is living up to their name: stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.

>Banks are going to have to decide whether they want to raise their rates to compete, or face bleeding customers. I'm sure the big boy banks are here stay. Most of them are in the category of, "too big to fail" (as the crisis a decade ago highlighted) and upstarts like Robinhood are but a blip-in-the-radar than a real threat to the established players, imo.

Also consumer checking accounts aren’t really that important to bigger banks or even bigger credit unions. Banks own a large portion of property that doesn’t fall into a checking account. For instance if you own a home and pay a mortgage to Wells Fargo, they control a far greater amount of your wealth than whoever you bank with.

Also, business banking and loans in general will never be something that happens on an Robinhood. At least not in this generation. These types of entities require a man in a suit in an office.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#335
Assuming the transfer from the checking account to the brokerage account is instant, this can give you a lot more liquidity to your stocks. Traditionally, I have to set aside few thousand dollars that I'm absolutely sure I won't need anytime soon, transfer it to a brokerage account, wait few days, remember to check if then money is in, buy the stock, then reverse the process to sell the stock. The round trip of money in checking account to owning a stock took few days but now it can be done under a minute for free.

Investing day to day with the money in your checking account is probably not a recommended personal finance practice but I definitely have more money in my checking account than I probably need this month because moving money is too painful.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#336

I just spent 3 months in London, and it's crazy how Monzo seems to have taken the market. Almost everybody seems to be paying with a Monzo card, regardless of age. Asking around, I consistently heard that Monzo's competitors like Revolut are going to be a future case study in scaling before great product/market fit. I don't know how many people have Revolut accounts, but nobody seems to be using their cards in public…

> Simple tried to reinvent banking, but they never seemed to go beyond polishing the UI.

Simple closed my account with no notice or recourse, because they failed to notify me that I needed to update some information.

I honestly can't believe I trusted my money to people so incompetent at even the basics of business.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#337
post #284

This whole checking account / savings account, credit card/ debit card system that Americans have to deal with is so cumbersome and backwards. For Europeans that don't know: Most Americans have (at least) those two accounts, and those two cards. They usually spend from their checking account with their credit card, and save on the savings account. When they spend on their credit card, they sometimes "earn" points, de…

I'm sorry, but your post is completely wrong. If this was an essay on American retail banking, you'd receive an F.

> Most Americans have (at least) those two accounts, and those two cards. They usually spend from their checking account with their credit card, and save on the savings account.

This is not true. A), most Americans do not have two accounts. The card used on your checking account is a debit card, and it does not allow you to have a negative balance without incurring a penalty fee. A credit card is a completely separate instrument that allows you to spend from $0 to -$ with the understanding that

> When they spend on their credit card, they sometimes "earn" points, depending on what agreement their bank has with the major retailers.

This, broadly speaking, is not true. The bank rarely, if ever, has any direct dealings with the retailers. This is mostly done through the payment network (Visa, MasterCard, etc., which Europe has as well).

> Salary is inserted on the checking account. Some people still receive salary on old fashioned paper checks. Some people still pay in stores using paper checks. Almost everyone, has a lot of paper dollars in their wallet since there are plenty of places in which you need it.

This is not true. Income is deposited wherever you indicated to your employer. This can be separated between savings accounts, retirement accounts, checking accounts, investment accounts, or even deposited directly to prepaid cards. Check paying is exceptionally rare among people under 50 (except for some holdouts, like apartment complexes), and virtually nobody carries wads of paper dollars around anymore. Many trendier stores in cities are now 100% cash free and do not handle paper money at all. Checks might still be issued, but most banks offer instantaneous deposit via smartphone.

> Now, on regular intervals, for example at the end of the month, Americans then transfer money from their savings account to their checking account if the salary is not enough to cover. If they forget, they pay high interests and fees.

This isn't true. For one, the only reason to transfer money from your savings account to your checking account is if you need to make a purchase with your saved funds, i.e. you've spent in excess of your means for that month. The purpose of a savings account is... to save. The idea is the number of withdrawals from the savings account are limited (by law). In return, the bank can offer you higher interest on your deposits because the money is less mobile. In the past, these interest rates were decent (over 4% APY was not uncommon). Since the financial crisis, savings accounts from major banks have offered insulting low rates (in some cases 0.05%).

You pay fees for drawing a negative balance in your checking account. Every bank now has the ability to link both savings and credit accounts to automatically cover these "overdrafts" automatically, with no user input.

> Generally speaking, it's a hassle to transfer money to people you know and fees are hefty. When you use your credit card, no pin code is usually needed. There are regularly issues with your credit card being abused.

This is somewhat true, but most banks are good at catching fraud before it becomes an issue for the customer. Europe, I might add, is not immune to credit card fraud despite using PIN codes for credit transactions. Debit transactions in the US commonly require a PIN code and have for decades, however this PIN code is not attached to the card chip like on European cards.

Beyond this, it isn't like Europe is some alien planet. There are definitely countries in Europe which offer the Checking/Savings/Credit structure.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#338
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this gets challenged in court at some point. The rules went into effect on September 28, 2001 as a knee-jerk reaction to the dot bomb and 9/11: http://www.finra.org/investors/day-trading-margin-requiremen... The real story is that the plebes realized they could make 2% per day by day trading and selling short. I did this with my dad and we were up about $40k before 9/11 wiped out most people's gains (this was…

> The real story is that the plebes realized they could make 2% per day by day trading and selling short. Can you please elaborate? I'm curious. Why was the money so "easy"? Simply because there were so many amateur traders?

Well 2001 was before trading bots for one thing, so most stocks had a daily heartbeat that was easy to follow. Several days a week the volatility on AAPL was easily +/- 1% each day, so we just bought low and sold high. I averaged 2% per day roughly 4 out of 5 days per week, losing 2-5% on the occasional day I was wrong. Also it was easy to predict when people would sell their stock on Fridays before 3 day weekends for example, so we'd sell Thursday afternoon or whatever.

Also we bought right after the dot bomb happened on 9/29/2000 when most all the tech stocks fell by half or more in one day, so there was a constant upward trend where people wanted to start gambling in stocks again over the next year:

https://money.cnn.com/2000/09/29/markets/techwrap/

You can see the drop here, I can't figure out how to share, but enter something like 9/28/2000 through 9/30/2000 in the date range:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/chart?p=AAPL

You have to remember that these events aren't random. I personally feel that they're controlled by whoever holds the purse strings, so a handful of extremely wealthy illuminati were getting nervous towards the end of the dot com and housing bubbles and made the call to pull the plug so they could re-buy after everything crashed (see: It's a Wonderful Life).

We're overdue for that with the mobile and web 2.0 bubble. The main difference today is that older folks like me remember the lean times so more startups today have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and are somewhat immune to these market manipulations vs propped-up brands like pets.com in the 90s. But don't think for a second that crashes (or booms) like these with a 50% move in one day can't happen again.

As long as I'm on my soapbox, I wish that I could dabble in a little machine learning and look for correlations that tend to swing together or oppositely one another. No matter how much the bots tend towards noise, there are still markets that are connected that should be easy to spot. I don't know what else I would try though because I stopped following the market after the housing bubble when people started trading foreign currency and Bitcoin etc. I could have bought $20,000 worth of bitcoin when it was $10 so it's all just monopoly money to me now. I feel that chasing easy money is maybe distracting us from real human progress. But what do I know, I'm just the poor sap stuck in the universe where I never made it big hahah.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like all "tech" companies - they're selling your data. They already do it in their brokerage accounts. Now imagine the value of knowing what you spend every single dollar on, how often you're shopping at a competitor, what time of day you're most likely to swipe your card, etc. They're SIPC insured (like a brokerge account) instead of FDIC insured (like a bank account) which is a subtle difference and ever-so-slightl…

> Now imagine the value of knowing what you spend every single dollar on, how often you're shopping at a competitor, what time of day you're most likely to swipe your card, etc. I'm curious what the harm here is. Are they going to blackmail people who shop at their competitors?

It's basically Facebook on steroids in terms of how much information they're going to have on their users. And, unlike Facebook, this "free" platform self-selects only the most valuable users (for marketing purposes): those with disposable income.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like both FDIC and SIPC have a 250K protection, are there any other differences between the two that would matter to an average consumer?

Maybe: > SIPC insurance provides protection for your cash balance and securities holdings if Robinhood fails financially, but does not cover investment losses due to declines in the value of securities themselves . Emphasis mine. If you put $250,000 into an FDIC-protected checking account, that account holds cash and FDIC protects the full amount of that cash. If you put $250,000 in an SIPC-protected brokerage accoun…

> When the return is higher, the risk must have gone up too, somehow.

I want to emphasize this point. You are never* getting returns for free, you are getting paid to take on some risk. If someone is trying to sell you "risk-free" returns that are higher than widely-known market rates, they are lying to you by downplaying, omitting or obfuscating the risk associated with those returns, and warning bells should be going off in your head. Proceed with caution.

* You can of course find better risk-adjusted returns than the market by way of information asymmetry in your favor. Suffice it to say that is not the case with a consumer financial instrument aimed at "the masses" (not high net worth individuals).

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