Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Robinhood launches 3% checking account

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 684 posts

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#641

Post by philip1209 »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #627
woolvalley wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In America, I don't think contactless matters that much currently. It's really a crap shoot if any specific retailer supports contactless, no major metro system that I know of support direct debit / credit contactless cards and no major bank or credit card company issues contactless cards. If you want to use contactless in america, you add the card to apple / google / samsung pay and use your phone for NFC payments.…

Most Amex US cards are now issued with contactless. Chase is about to add it to all their cards.

Capital One cards all seem to have it, too.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#643

Post by callalex »

kevindong wrote: post #341
philip1209 wrote: post #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…

> My benchmark is Charles Schwab Bank, which offers free ATM 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. Why do you say it's a bad product? I use Schwab as my main account and it works great for me.

I use Scwhab "high yield" (lol) as my primary checking account. I find it worthwhile due to the simple requirements/no worry of random fees, and because I can walk up to any crappy atm anywhere in the world and just get money without thinking about it. My experiences with customer service have been positive. But their approach to security is an absolute joke. They're an online-only bank, that stores your password in plaintext (and don't allow your passwords to be more than 8 characters/have any non-alphanumeric characters), regularly asks you to type your social security number over the phone, and have such poor fraud detection that I have their IVR memorized to just get them to leave me alone because they have cried wolf so many times.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#644

Post by callalex »

deathanatos wrote: post #526
dzhiurgis wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cashier was shocked when I used my contactless card in middle of SF. She nearly screamed "WHAT DID YOU JUST DO???". Meanwhile even in smallest villages of Europe no one bats an eye anymore. America is bizarre!

I just flew through 4 different airports in the last week, and every single one of them, the payment device had a chip reader, but all of them were blocked with a piece of cardstock instructing the person to swipe. Why? (I think they're all run by the same company, HMSHost, who, AFAICT as a traveler, has a monopoly on airport food.)

This is a perfect example of how bonkers/stupid banking is in the USA. If the retailer allows you to do a chip/pin transaction (much more secure than a magnetic stripe) THEY are liable for any fraud. Whereas a magnetic stripe transaction (super insecure) places all liability on the payment processor. So there is a perverse incentive to stick with old crappy technology. https://qz.com/717876/the-chip-card-transition-in-the-us-has...

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#645

Post by setr »

zem wrote: post #533
patio11 wrote: post #115

For folks trying to understand this, some context which may be useful: Checking accounts are loss leaders virtually everywhere, the exception being smaller community banks. Their primary revenue stream was, once upon a time, net interest income, but these days due to the extremely low interest environment and alternate sources of funding the revenue stream is more weighted towards fees (primarily NSFs, although that…

> Metacomment: geeks who believe they have outmathed a financial firm should ask themselves "Are financial firms likely to be bad at math?" and "Are financial firms incapable of hiring their own geeks?" reminds me of the first time i interviewed at google, and one of the interviewers asked "if you could set up your own project and get a team to work on it, what would you do?". i answered that i would get a bunch of m…

I’ve never imagined link farms to be so profitable an enterprise that they could afford a team of phds and come out ahead; but if they could, then its an arm race, and google would be at a much greater disadvantaged if they didn’t have their own.

Thus, your response should have been: link farms with their own phds is only more reason to instantiate your plan

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#646

Post by rightbyte »

zackmorris wrote: post #338
55555 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

"Easy money"? It's called luck and luck is hard to come by.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#647

Post by setr »

rspeer wrote: post #622
RA_Fisher wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find legacy banks a nuisance. They're always trying to get me to come into a bank branch.

Huh. I don't have much of a problem going in to a bank branch, given that there's one every half mile. A quick in-person meeting is fine compared to the shitstorm of unusable menus and nearly unintelligible communication that is calling your bank on a cell phone. (I mean it would be great if there were a bank that did all its customer service over text chat, but that's too much to ask for, right?)

Well, they’re trying, with chatbots

And I’d really wish they’d just stop

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#648

Post by notyourday »

mikelward wrote: post #620
notyourday wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the SPIC fails to cover the cash balances to the coverage limits, the financial world as we know it stopped existing. This are cash balances, not money market funds or any other funds.

Bloomberg says it's a money market account. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-13/robinh... Robinhood's checking page says "Robinhood Checking and Savings is an added feature to existing Robinhood accounts and is not a separate account or a bank account."

I have not dug thought this specific offering but here is how it works in general it works this way:

Account has 3 parts:

1. Marketable securities -- value is NOT insured.

2. Cash on hand -- value IS ensured.

3. Money market fund -- value is NOT insured.

(3) may or may not be offered and if (3) is offered it has to be elected by the account holder. Money cannot flow from (1) to (3) or from (3) to (1) bypassing (2) due to securities regulations -- one cannot pay for one security with another security, a settled cash must be used.

If the APY is on (2) they will get killed by the fatwallet/slickdeals crowd. If the APY is on (3) it is more complicated but debit/check transactions against (3) are very expensive to clear so I don't quite see what the play is.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#649

Post by guelo »

stupidbird wrote: post #548
fermienrico wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stocks are traded everywhere in the world. What’s this have to do with The American Dream!?

The American Dream is to accumulate wealth, and often involves looking for a way to get rich quick, some people think they can do it by day trading. There's a certain American stereotype of playing stocks to become wealthy.

There are cultures where they don't dream about accumulating wealth?

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#650

Post by Nasrudith »

jdmichal wrote: post #491
FlimGrimoire wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metacomment: geeks who believe they have outmathed a financial firm should ask themselves "Are financial firms likely to be bad at math?" and "Are financial firms incapable of hiring their own geeks?" Ah yes, because as 2000, 2008, and 2019 have shown us, financial firms are infallible when it comes to maths and economics.

At least 2008 had nothing to do with being good or bad at math. In fact, it kind of happened because of some rather fancy math. This article has been posted on HN multiple times: https://www.wired.com/2009/02/wp-quant/

I would call misapplying mathematical tools being bad at math personally. If you said that because you are intergrating revenue back into investments and are showing nx growth you'll get quadratic growth in exchange for cutting growth in half I would call that being bad at math. An uncommon form of it but still bad due to it being a clear failure to model the underlying domain. They did the same thing really by not taking common cause failures into account at all, thinking one can build low risk out of high risks, and more that an ounce of critical thinking could have saved them from.
Post reply on HN