11 ms·

I appreciate the zero commission trading, but at the same time, I'm worried about the attitude towards "investing" that they promote. Most people should arguabl

by dguo 9y ago

I appreciate the zero commission trading, but at the same time, I'm worried about the attitude towards "investing" that they promote. Most people should arguably be putting their money into index funds and holding for the long term[1], not picking individual stocks and following price movements on a daily basis. I wouldn't criticize anyone for speculating (i.e. gambling) with money they can afford to lose. I've done that before, and I know how fun it can be. But it shouldn't be the primary strategy for most people. We should be signing up with Betterment/Wealthfront/Vanguard before Robinhood. I have the Robinhood app but haven't made any trades yet. I had to turn off push notifications for things like "Snapchat declined 5% today". That kind of thing is what causes people to trade on their emotions, a great starting point for losing money in the long term. Instead of buying low and selling high, they end up doing the opposite. [1]: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started

ozmbie 9y ago
The whole software/startup approach is currently based on user growth which relies on retention, trigger, actions, and rewards. Long-term investments don’t fit that model so there is no incentive for them to encourage that form of user behaviour.
- tysonzni 9y ago
  User retention is arguably linked to capital preservation. So they do have some incentive to ensure people don’t lose their investments by trading too much. When the market gets more volatile or if there’s a sharp downturn, that would become a big issue. Not sure they had to address this yet because since 2014 their founding year the market had been on a smooth, upward trajectory. A recession however is already around the corner.
vikascoder 9y ago
That's a good thought but zero commision doesnt really change the investment attitude that much apart from the fact that it makes very low value plays possible. There are tons of people having the same speculative investment behaviour on both sides of the line especially on larger bets. It's the smaller bets that Robinhood makes possible. I would also argue that Robinhood is a great playground to learn trading at minimal cost. I have tons of freinds with 500 dollar portfolios playing around and learning the ropes. This was seldom attractive with web based serious accounts. In the end it's all about discipline and eventually Robinhood users reach the same investment mindset as regular account players very soon.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
AdenFlorian 9y ago
Have you seen the vanguard ETFs in Robinhood? Would those be just as good as using the funds directly with vanguard?
- astrange 9y ago
  Yes, better because the minimum is $0 not $10,000. It's not as good as Betterment/Wealthfront/Hedgeable because you can't rebalance, reinvest dividends, or get fractional shares.
  - dandud 9y ago
    Important to note that when purchasing ETFs through Vanguard the minimum investment amount is the cost of a single share. No large minimum amounts such as the $3000 or $10000 with their mutual funds.
  - tanderson92 9y ago
    You can rebalance and reinvest dividends at Vanguard.
    - Scoundreller 9y ago
      Does the amount of dividend need to be the cost of one share? If so, with VTI trading at $140, you would need about 250 shares to buy a share with each dividend.
      - tanderson92 9y ago
        No.
      - dguo 9y ago
        No, they allow fractional shares. Source: https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/brokerage-dividend-reinvestment https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/brokerage-dividend-r... "When reinvesting dividends, Vanguard Brokerage Services combines the cash distributions from the accounts of all clients who have requested reinvestment in the same security, and then uses that combined total to purchase additional shares of the security in the open market. Vanguard Brokerage will attempt to purchase the reinvestment shares by entering a market order at the market opening on the payable date. The new shares are divided proportionately among the clients' accounts, in whole and fractional shares rounded to three decimal places. If the total purchase can't be completed in one trade, clients will receive shares purchased at the weighted average price paid by Vanguard Brokerage Services."
wgerard 9y ago
> Most people should arguably be putting their money into index funds and holding for the long term I think Robinhood is great for that! Zero commission means you can afford to buy small amounts without worrying about fees eating into your principal too much. You can put in $250 every pay period and buy a share of $SPY without losing ~3% to fees. With commissions involved you'd want to wait until you could afford a larger trade, at which point you've lost time in the market.
- jcdavis 9y ago
  Vanguard charges no fees for buying/selling their owns ETFs. I believe Schwab and others do as well.
  - meatbundragon 9y ago
    While this is a great point, the casual segment of the customer base that is being discussed would certainly not have enough awareness of this fact. At the very least, I didn't even though I do trade ETFs and large cap stocks casually...
    - AFNobody 9y ago
      I am sorry but "casual investors" should be doing long term buy and hold because if you can't be bothered to spend 30 minutes on research to compare brokerages, I am genuinely horrified at the idea of you doing anything other than buying and holding an index fund. Robinhood's encouragement of the instant gratification, poorly researched trades is going to end badly for many of it's customers when we enter a bear market.
      - meatbundragon 9y ago
        I disagree that investors' abilities to understand stocks and create portfolios should be judged by someone's willingness to find which individual brokerages offer free buy/sell of their own ETFs.
  - deleted 9y ago
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
There's a middle ground between day trading and just putting your money in an S&P 500 index fund and never looking at it again. Trading stocks can be fun and help you make a lot of money if you're able to spot undervalued investments. It's very complicated, but anyone can learn the basics of value investing and do a little bit of stock picking on the side.
- stouset 9y ago
  That is an absolutely gargantuan “if”, given that any particular retail investor is overwhelmingly unlikely to possess novel knowledge or insight in any market. The number of times this ever happens is outweighed a millionfold by the frequency of times where people incorrectly believe this to be the case. What happens in the vast majority of cases is that people believe they’re making money, but after fees are actually losing to index funds. Or people believe they’re making money, but lose their shirts the moment the market turns sideways. Or people do succeed due to completely random chance, but the level of risk they took on to make that return is significantly higher than other investments with comparable returns.
  - omarforgotpwd 9y ago
    That's true, most people likely won't know what they're doing. But it's possible to spend some time, pick up something like The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham, and invest a little yourself. Ordinary people can sometimes have investable insights that most players in the market are not aware of.
  - smileysteve 9y ago
    > given that any particular ~~retail~~ professional investor is overwhelmingly unlikely Reminder from Random Walk Down Wall Street; Professionals rarely beat the S&P 500 Index on a time horizon. It's statistically likely, that if a professional fund does beat the index one year, then it will underperform the next year.
- rifung 9y ago
  While I also would like to learn how to trade stocks and believe in value investing, I think this comment severely understates the difficulty of beating the market. Let's not forget that the vast majority of professionals who do this day in and out can not beat the market on consistently.
syassami 9y ago
you think they need a slap on the wrist for the attitude they promote? have you seen etrades recent ad campaigns? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ2Fa0zVglU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ2Fa0zVglU
- kelukelugames 9y ago
  Etrade has always been doing this though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnQMq5wtZcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnQMq5wtZcg
logicallee 9y ago
Index funds aren't just boring, there is something morally abhorrent about simply investing in everything that has done well enough to be in an index fund. At that rate, why not invest in government bonds, given that the government gets whatever share it wants of literally every penny that goes through commerce in any capacity? If you want security, why invest in anything other than the government? I admire people for investing their money actively instead of in an index. It is the closest you can come to the capitalist spirit without actually doing anything. (Not a slight - not everyone needs to "do something" in the sense of starting a business - but being an active investor is very close to the same.) Actively investing takes guts and a kind of entrepreneurial risk-taking.
- twblalock 9y ago
  I don't admire active investors. Most of them are going to get killed on commissions and fees and won't be able to compete with the professionals who spend all day, every day investing and have sources of information that aren't available to retail investors. It's good that most Robin Hood investors are young and don't have much to lose. I hope they learn their lesson before they put they are old enough to put their retirement investments at risk.
  - rak00n 9y ago
    To be honest it's a good sandbox.
- zanny 9y ago
  > If you want security, why invest in anything other than the government? Because you make more money in index funds with comparable security? Bonds used to be the principal way to save and invest in the past when interest rates were much higher. Its honestly a bit of a shame that as a society loaning money to the government is such a poor investment - it more reflects on the failings of the state if there is literally nothing profitable they can do with money to justify a competitive return. States can do pretty much anything a company can and more, and in a perfect world would be the best managers of capital. Thats where concepts like single payer healthcare come from, after all. And add to that that not everyone wants to be a capitalist. Index funds are specialization of labor - let the teachers teach and the doctors save lives while their money is invested and managed by people who are good at tracking markets. That being said, financial advisory in general is adjacent to such prestigious professions as televangelists and online poker in my mind - the most successful in the business have almost no correlation with actually sane analytical expertise and more to do with who can advertise the best. Fundamentally it is all making educated guesses, and until shit hits the fan people flock to whoever boasts the most rather than whoever is nuanced and rational, at least until after a stock crashes or a market tanks.
misterbowfinger 9y ago
If Robinhood opened up an API, wouldn't it be possible to invest in a way that mirrors existing index funds? I'm not super familiar with the details but it feels like it would be.
- dguo 9y ago
  It'd be possible, but you can buy index funds on Robinhood already. Other services that are built around long term investing provide additional features like automatic rebalancing and dividend reinvesting. An API could allow you to emulate those as well, but at that point, it seems like you might as well just use a robo-advisor instead of building your own on top of an API.
Veraticus 9y ago
There's also M1 Finance (https://www.m1finance.com/ https://www.m1finance.com/), which is all about long term investing. Commission-free like Robinhood, but it also has fractional shares. Makes it even easier than Robinhood to manage a well-balanced portfolio.
siruncledrew 9y ago
That's why the $0 commission is such a key feature. They know people enjoy the emotional high of seeing the green numbers in their account when they open the app. This isn't a tool for high net-worth individuals, people that want "traditional" (Vanguard, Wealthfront, Schwab) wealth management investing with long-term planning, or advanced traders looking for Bloomberg terminal-esque features. This is designed to allow the average person to play with their money and see if they can "beat the market". It's like a fintech online casino. It's not gambling per se, but it definitely has a lot of psychological overlap with it for many of its users. With the addition of crypto trading, they've basically just opened up their new slot machines to the public. I played with the Robinhood app before as well, but stopped using it after a couple weeks because it's just more of a novelty than a dedicated investment platform with all the features I want. I can see how some people that don't want all the complicated financial markets stuff would enjoy it though. If people think $0 trading is a short-cut to becoming a millionaire day trader though, they are in for a very bad time.
- bigtunacan 9y ago
  I’m probably not the average Robinhood user, but I was already putting about $50k/year into index funds for retirement. So rather than putting even more in these I wanted to research and invest directly in a handful of stocks long term. I used to use Scottrade for this. That’s not too bad $7/trade ($14/round-trip). If I’m making a sizable enough investment that won’t matter too much. But what if I only had $24 this week? I could buy one share of Ford on Scott-trade, but then I’m upside down until the price doubles (e.g. forever upside down). With Robinhood I can make buys no matter how small the purchase.
  - what_ever 9y ago
    Thanks. I think so many people here don't understand how people use RH and quickly jump to conclusion thinking it's only "low net-worth individuals" using it. Before RH, people still invested in individual stocks and it wasn't only "low net-worth" individuals attracted by the greens and reds in the UI doing those.
prostoalex 9y ago
> Most people should arguably be putting their money into index funds and holding for the long term Fidelity’s internal survey revealed that best performance correlated with low account activity http://www.businessinsider.com/forgetful-investors-performed-best-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/forgetful-investors-performed...
- what_ever 9y ago
  But it's very possible most of the users of RH wouldn't have invested any money at all if not for RH. I know many of my friends wouldn't have. Now whether they make money is a different argument.
- icelancer 9y ago
  The vast majority of that is due to transaction fees/commissions, which RH doesn't have. I would still expect this to hold up even on a zero-commission basis, but the effect would be significantly diminished.
  - prostoalex 9y ago
    The transaction fees start to matter when the number of transactions goes up. Fidelity's thesis was the account growth was correlated to complete lack of transactions (except for DRIP, I guess). On a side note, zero-fee instruments are not that rare for brokerages nowadays. Fidelity itself lists 3,691 mutual funds https://www.fidelity.com/fund-screener/research.shtml https://www.fidelity.com/fund-screener/research.shtml and 93 ETFs https://www.fidelity.com/etfs/overview https://www.fidelity.com/etfs/overview as fee-free, and I think they're not even the leader in the space.
johnpowell 9y ago
For some perspective. My uncle (retired from the Air Force) got into stocks in 1998. He did not tell my aunt until around 2002. He lost around 200K of their retirement because he was unwilling to accept loss. He is still at it and has moved on to day-trading and is doing just as bad. It is a addiction and he does not use Robinhood. I was living with my sisters kid and set him up with a Robinhood account and stuck a few hundred in it. I explained things a bit and he was still sure he could time the market just with SPY and QQQ. He could not. I guess it is good people have a playground to learn that they really don't know what they are doing before they become my uncle.
- sf_rob 9y ago
  While it may be helpful to make the stakes real for your nephew, there are fake/paper trading accounts available at many brokerages.
  - selectodude 9y ago
    Paper trading is like playing poker without money. You’re still going to take risks you wouldn’t otherwise because there’s no pain.
  - johnpowell 9y ago
    I used them for a bit. Perhaps I am weak but I took my paper losses as a mistake and my gains as my prowess. And I don't like to think I made the wrong decision. So we can go from there into how people make horrible decisions.
username223 9y ago
> I had to turn off push notifications for things like "Snapchat declined 5% today". This is telling to me. If they have opt-out notifications nudging users to make various day-trades, they're in shady territory. Kind of the opposite of Robin Hood.

by dguo 9y ago

ozmbie 9y ago

The whole software/startup approach is currently based on user growth which relies on retention, trigger, actions, and rewards. Long-term investments don’t fit that model so there is no incentive for them to encourage that form of user behaviour.

tysonzni 9y ago
User retention is arguably linked to capital preservation. So they do have some incentive to ensure people don’t lose their investments by trading too much. When the market gets more volatile or if there’s a sharp downturn, that would become a big issue. Not sure they had to address this yet because since 2014 their founding year the market had been on a smooth, upward trajectory. A recession however is already around the corner.

vikascoder 9y ago

That's a good thought but zero commision doesnt really change the investment attitude that much apart from the fact that it makes very low value plays possible. There are tons of people having the same speculative investment behaviour on both sides of the line especially on larger bets. It's the smaller bets that Robinhood makes possible. I would also argue that Robinhood is a great playground to learn trading at minimal cost. I have tons of freinds with 500 dollar portfolios playing around and learning the ropes. This was seldom attractive with web based serious accounts. In the end it's all about discipline and eventually Robinhood users reach the same investment mindset as regular account players very soon.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

AdenFlorian 9y ago

Have you seen the vanguard ETFs in Robinhood? Would those be just as good as using the funds directly with vanguard?

astrange 9y ago
Yes, better because the minimum is $0 not $10,000. It's not as good as Betterment/Wealthfront/Hedgeable because you can't rebalance, reinvest dividends, or get fractional shares.
- dandud 9y ago
  Important to note that when purchasing ETFs through Vanguard the minimum investment amount is the cost of a single share. No large minimum amounts such as the $3000 or $10000 with their mutual funds.
- tanderson92 9y ago
  You can rebalance and reinvest dividends at Vanguard.
  - Scoundreller 9y ago
    Does the amount of dividend need to be the cost of one share? If so, with VTI trading at $140, you would need about 250 shares to buy a share with each dividend.
    - tanderson92 9y ago
      No.
    - dguo 9y ago
      No, they allow fractional shares. Source: https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/brokerage-dividend-reinvestment https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/brokerage-dividend-r... "When reinvesting dividends, Vanguard Brokerage Services combines the cash distributions from the accounts of all clients who have requested reinvestment in the same security, and then uses that combined total to purchase additional shares of the security in the open market. Vanguard Brokerage will attempt to purchase the reinvestment shares by entering a market order at the market opening on the payable date. The new shares are divided proportionately among the clients' accounts, in whole and fractional shares rounded to three decimal places. If the total purchase can't be completed in one trade, clients will receive shares purchased at the weighted average price paid by Vanguard Brokerage Services."

wgerard 9y ago

> Most people should arguably be putting their money into index funds and holding for the long term I think Robinhood is great for that! Zero commission means you can afford to buy small amounts without worrying about fees eating into your principal too much. You can put in $250 every pay period and buy a share of $SPY without losing ~3% to fees. With commissions involved you'd want to wait until you could afford a larger trade, at which point you've lost time in the market.

jcdavis 9y ago
Vanguard charges no fees for buying/selling their owns ETFs. I believe Schwab and others do as well.
- meatbundragon 9y ago
  While this is a great point, the casual segment of the customer base that is being discussed would certainly not have enough awareness of this fact. At the very least, I didn't even though I do trade ETFs and large cap stocks casually...
  - AFNobody 9y ago
    I am sorry but "casual investors" should be doing long term buy and hold because if you can't be bothered to spend 30 minutes on research to compare brokerages, I am genuinely horrified at the idea of you doing anything other than buying and holding an index fund. Robinhood's encouragement of the instant gratification, poorly researched trades is going to end badly for many of it's customers when we enter a bear market.
    - meatbundragon 9y ago
      I disagree that investors' abilities to understand stocks and create portfolios should be judged by someone's willingness to find which individual brokerages offer free buy/sell of their own ETFs.
- deleted 9y ago

omarforgotpwd 9y ago

There's a middle ground between day trading and just putting your money in an S&P 500 index fund and never looking at it again. Trading stocks can be fun and help you make a lot of money if you're able to spot undervalued investments. It's very complicated, but anyone can learn the basics of value investing and do a little bit of stock picking on the side.

stouset 9y ago
That is an absolutely gargantuan “if”, given that any particular retail investor is overwhelmingly unlikely to possess novel knowledge or insight in any market. The number of times this ever happens is outweighed a millionfold by the frequency of times where people incorrectly believe this to be the case. What happens in the vast majority of cases is that people believe they’re making money, but after fees are actually losing to index funds. Or people believe they’re making money, but lose their shirts the moment the market turns sideways. Or people do succeed due to completely random chance, but the level of risk they took on to make that return is significantly higher than other investments with comparable returns.
- omarforgotpwd 9y ago
  That's true, most people likely won't know what they're doing. But it's possible to spend some time, pick up something like The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham, and invest a little yourself. Ordinary people can sometimes have investable insights that most players in the market are not aware of.
- smileysteve 9y ago
  > given that any particular ~~retail~~ professional investor is overwhelmingly unlikely Reminder from Random Walk Down Wall Street; Professionals rarely beat the S&P 500 Index on a time horizon. It's statistically likely, that if a professional fund does beat the index one year, then it will underperform the next year.
rifung 9y ago
While I also would like to learn how to trade stocks and believe in value investing, I think this comment severely understates the difficulty of beating the market. Let's not forget that the vast majority of professionals who do this day in and out can not beat the market on consistently.

syassami 9y ago

you think they need a slap on the wrist for the attitude they promote? have you seen etrades recent ad campaigns? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ2Fa0zVglU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ2Fa0zVglU

kelukelugames 9y ago
Etrade has always been doing this though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnQMq5wtZcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnQMq5wtZcg

logicallee 9y ago

Index funds aren't just boring, there is something morally abhorrent about simply investing in everything that has done well enough to be in an index fund. At that rate, why not invest in government bonds, given that the government gets whatever share it wants of literally every penny that goes through commerce in any capacity? If you want security, why invest in anything other than the government? I admire people for investing their money actively instead of in an index. It is the closest you can come to the capitalist spirit without actually doing anything. (Not a slight - not everyone needs to "do something" in the sense of starting a business - but being an active investor is very close to the same.) Actively investing takes guts and a kind of entrepreneurial risk-taking.

twblalock 9y ago
I don't admire active investors. Most of them are going to get killed on commissions and fees and won't be able to compete with the professionals who spend all day, every day investing and have sources of information that aren't available to retail investors. It's good that most Robin Hood investors are young and don't have much to lose. I hope they learn their lesson before they put they are old enough to put their retirement investments at risk.
- rak00n 9y ago
  To be honest it's a good sandbox.
zanny 9y ago
> If you want security, why invest in anything other than the government? Because you make more money in index funds with comparable security? Bonds used to be the principal way to save and invest in the past when interest rates were much higher. Its honestly a bit of a shame that as a society loaning money to the government is such a poor investment - it more reflects on the failings of the state if there is literally nothing profitable they can do with money to justify a competitive return. States can do pretty much anything a company can and more, and in a perfect world would be the best managers of capital. Thats where concepts like single payer healthcare come from, after all. And add to that that not everyone wants to be a capitalist. Index funds are specialization of labor - let the teachers teach and the doctors save lives while their money is invested and managed by people who are good at tracking markets. That being said, financial advisory in general is adjacent to such prestigious professions as televangelists and online poker in my mind - the most successful in the business have almost no correlation with actually sane analytical expertise and more to do with who can advertise the best. Fundamentally it is all making educated guesses, and until shit hits the fan people flock to whoever boasts the most rather than whoever is nuanced and rational, at least until after a stock crashes or a market tanks.

misterbowfinger 9y ago

If Robinhood opened up an API, wouldn't it be possible to invest in a way that mirrors existing index funds? I'm not super familiar with the details but it feels like it would be.

dguo 9y ago
It'd be possible, but you can buy index funds on Robinhood already. Other services that are built around long term investing provide additional features like automatic rebalancing and dividend reinvesting. An API could allow you to emulate those as well, but at that point, it seems like you might as well just use a robo-advisor instead of building your own on top of an API.

Veraticus 9y ago

There's also M1 Finance (https://www.m1finance.com/ https://www.m1finance.com/), which is all about long term investing. Commission-free like Robinhood, but it also has fractional shares. Makes it even easier than Robinhood to manage a well-balanced portfolio.

siruncledrew 9y ago

That's why the $0 commission is such a key feature. They know people enjoy the emotional high of seeing the green numbers in their account when they open the app. This isn't a tool for high net-worth individuals, people that want "traditional" (Vanguard, Wealthfront, Schwab) wealth management investing with long-term planning, or advanced traders looking for Bloomberg terminal-esque features. This is designed to allow the average person to play with their money and see if they can "beat the market". It's like a fintech online casino. It's not gambling per se, but it definitely has a lot of psychological overlap with it for many of its users. With the addition of crypto trading, they've basically just opened up their new slot machines to the public. I played with the Robinhood app before as well, but stopped using it after a couple weeks because it's just more of a novelty than a dedicated investment platform with all the features I want. I can see how some people that don't want all the complicated financial markets stuff would enjoy it though. If people think $0 trading is a short-cut to becoming a millionaire day trader though, they are in for a very bad time.

bigtunacan 9y ago
I’m probably not the average Robinhood user, but I was already putting about $50k/year into index funds for retirement. So rather than putting even more in these I wanted to research and invest directly in a handful of stocks long term. I used to use Scottrade for this. That’s not too bad $7/trade ($14/round-trip). If I’m making a sizable enough investment that won’t matter too much. But what if I only had $24 this week? I could buy one share of Ford on Scott-trade, but then I’m upside down until the price doubles (e.g. forever upside down). With Robinhood I can make buys no matter how small the purchase.
- what_ever 9y ago
  Thanks. I think so many people here don't understand how people use RH and quickly jump to conclusion thinking it's only "low net-worth individuals" using it. Before RH, people still invested in individual stocks and it wasn't only "low net-worth" individuals attracted by the greens and reds in the UI doing those.

prostoalex 9y ago

> Most people should arguably be putting their money into index funds and holding for the long term Fidelity’s internal survey revealed that best performance correlated with low account activity http://www.businessinsider.com/forgetful-investors-performed-best-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/forgetful-investors-performed...

what_ever 9y ago
But it's very possible most of the users of RH wouldn't have invested any money at all if not for RH. I know many of my friends wouldn't have. Now whether they make money is a different argument.
icelancer 9y ago
The vast majority of that is due to transaction fees/commissions, which RH doesn't have. I would still expect this to hold up even on a zero-commission basis, but the effect would be significantly diminished.
- prostoalex 9y ago
  The transaction fees start to matter when the number of transactions goes up. Fidelity's thesis was the account growth was correlated to complete lack of transactions (except for DRIP, I guess). On a side note, zero-fee instruments are not that rare for brokerages nowadays. Fidelity itself lists 3,691 mutual funds https://www.fidelity.com/fund-screener/research.shtml https://www.fidelity.com/fund-screener/research.shtml and 93 ETFs https://www.fidelity.com/etfs/overview https://www.fidelity.com/etfs/overview as fee-free, and I think they're not even the leader in the space.

johnpowell 9y ago

For some perspective. My uncle (retired from the Air Force) got into stocks in 1998. He did not tell my aunt until around 2002. He lost around 200K of their retirement because he was unwilling to accept loss. He is still at it and has moved on to day-trading and is doing just as bad. It is a addiction and he does not use Robinhood. I was living with my sisters kid and set him up with a Robinhood account and stuck a few hundred in it. I explained things a bit and he was still sure he could time the market just with SPY and QQQ. He could not. I guess it is good people have a playground to learn that they really don't know what they are doing before they become my uncle.

sf_rob 9y ago
While it may be helpful to make the stakes real for your nephew, there are fake/paper trading accounts available at many brokerages.
- selectodude 9y ago
  Paper trading is like playing poker without money. You’re still going to take risks you wouldn’t otherwise because there’s no pain.
- johnpowell 9y ago
  I used them for a bit. Perhaps I am weak but I took my paper losses as a mistake and my gains as my prowess. And I don't like to think I made the wrong decision. So we can go from there into how people make horrible decisions.

username223 9y ago

> I had to turn off push notifications for things like "Snapchat declined 5% today". This is telling to me. If they have opt-out notifications nudging users to make various day-trades, they're in shady territory. Kind of the opposite of Robin Hood.