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Robinhood launches 3% checking account

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Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#651

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Hahaha, I love this comment because when I'm trying to buy options it always makes me chuckle how they allow these type of people to trade naked options

You can't buy a naked call/put. Naked, covered, and cash secured are terms used to describe how you are covering your downside when you are selling options. When you buy an option, your downside is always the cash you spent on the option, so you don't have different types of purchases. When you buy you are just buying an option. As for Robinhood, they don't allow for selling of naked options, only covered and cash se…

Interesting, thanks!

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#652
post #96

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Brokerages love fat cats and most provide free high quality additional insurance up to at least 5-10M. What happens if brokerage fails? My bet is its insurance, reinsurance or gov't would bail investors out (ask Lehman clients many of whom had accounts a LOT bigger than 250k). My guess is that it is safe to keep at least 5M in a single brokerage, but decide for yourself.

Do you have any links or reading material about what lehman clients were able to pull out?

This came after a quick search, which seems to confirm that if a client had, say, 100 shares of Amazon in a brokerage account at LB he would still have those: a brokerage must separate retail customers investments in other securities from its own money and funds.

https://www.kiplinger.com/article/investing/T023-C000-S001-w...

However, reading more I am not as sure that individual investors holding money in LB investing in other (non-LB) securities did not suffer. I am not an expert and cannot always distinguish between reputable sources and conspiracy theorists. Can someone provide some good references?

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#653

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>their core strategy, which is spending what would otherwise be a marketing budget on keeping commissions at zero, making money on the other ways "Making money others ways" aka stripping their clients of financial privacy by selling their clients' investment-decision data: "Robinhood Is Making Millions Selling Out Their Millennial Customers To High-Frequency Traders"[1] If your investment brokerage firm's strategy is…

Aren't all orders eventually public anyway? I get that the liquidity that "market makers" claim to create is not really that beneficial to society, but as long as you're not trying to use robinhood to compete with the high speed traders, I don't see a problem with it.

Not doing so or at least in a condescended form is kind of operating a fraudulent exchange. It is kosher to bundle 50 buy orders of 1 stock into 1 order or visa versa - get a bunch of little orders that adds up to a cheaper option. If it doesn't work out refund and inform that it failed to go through. If they asked for 1 share at $25 and you legitimately give it to them it isn't fraud. It is another to say "buy" Tesla shares for people when you really shovel it into another investment and work out what they owe when you think they will just go bankrupt and Theranos is the way of thw future....

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#654

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Yeah, the younger crowd doesn't trade, not because "the maaaan" is keeping them from it, but because it's a very complicated way of making money, and they typically don't want to learn how to do it right. What this startup is doing is telling the younger crowd that it's the former, while also saying "Look how easy this is!" and deliberately oversimplifying complex systems.

It's not a matter of complexity, it's a matter of power, or rather, information asymmetry. Buying stocks isn't really investing, it's more akin to gambling like Poker, with all other investors at the table. Many of those investors have massive computers, R&D firms, brilliant minds, 'inside information', and relationships with those companies and CEO's. So what 'millenial' is going to trade better than those? Zero. Or…

The real appeal from the users I have heard is lack of gatekeeping and minimal tolls which I suppose makes it essentially a knife with just a thin hilt as a handle - technically you can save money using it responsibly but most people just hurt themselves.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#655
post #312
post #288

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> 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?

Intraday trading is much less risky than holding a position overnight. A lot of movement happens in the first and last 30 mins of trading, and over lunch. You can exit unproductive positions quickly, whereas if you couldn't day trade you'd only be able to sit and watch how the cards are falling.

Can't you just set autosell conditions to do the equivalent of the function with less time sensitivity? If you can't handle a $10 drop cut out at a $5 and lock in savings if it rises by $15.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#656
post #645
post #533

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> 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

>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.

Go on a blackhat SEO forum. Look at the number of sellers, the number of listings, the number of positive feedback and the cost of some packages (you can easily go on and spend 50$ or a 1000$+ for a single package). There's a LOT of money in blackhat SEO. That's just the people offering to do it for you.

Then look at the dozens of software packages for sell that are constantly being updated and have both one-time fees and ongoing subscription pricing.

Then go look at the people selling just various social media accounts which mass-creation of gets harder and harder.

Then there's people that sell VPS access. They'll buy the software tools and host them all on a VPS and rent to you weekly or monthly so you can shell out tens of dollars or hundreds of dollars a month instead of needing to cough up thousands just to get all of the software for the month.

And that's just what's readily available with paypal or a credit card on the clearnet.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#657

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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.

I clearly missed the boat on that one, when did they start doing that? Mine is still swipe + chip only.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#658
post #444

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…

> 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. Monzo is a licensed bank in the UK, and Revolut is not. Still, Revolut has about 30% more customers in the UK than Monzo, and about 3x more in total, since it's available in t…

Revolut have a banking license now: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/12/revolut-gets-european-bank...

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#659

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> Seems like a weak market to go after, given that people likely to respond to a "cool" financial services brand may be a poorer demographic that maybe doesn't have any prior experience with "legacy" financial services providers. Yeah but people do grow up. And I don't know about you, but I've got some super long term relationships with some banks. They are in it for the long game.

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

I've used a legacy bank since the credit union I used in college slammed me with a wall of fees.

The branches have only been to my benefit, never really required, just faster.

Re: Robinhood launches 3% checking account

#660
post #440

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> Trading for most people used to be deliberately obtuse. When Robinhood initiates options trading by asking you, "Do you think the stock is going to go up?" on a phone interface, they've decided that trading is now just for morons.

Why wouldn't trading be for morons? Should we also limit loans to people who have a specific minimum IQ or do we live in a free society?

Idk if we should, but we do. Generally getting a loan includes this thing called the credit approval process. If one is unable to responsibility manage their personal finances they have a good chance of being limited in their access to loans.
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