Something about Robinhood just makes me uneasy - clearly their main target market is the small retail investor who is sensitive to a $7/trade fee, but the low friction, mobile-first no fee stock trading experience they've created mostly serves to encourage bad investor behavior i.e. emotional, irrational day trading among people who can least afford it.
Now they are "democratizing" margin trading (Robinhood Gold), options trading, and crypto...no professional investor who actually knows what he/she is doing is going to be served well by a mobile trading app - this is a play for the mostly uneducated retail investor (and small minority of knowledgable retail traders) who has no idea what they're getting into when they buy a call option in X or trade btc on margin.
I remember seeing on their social a now deleted tweet that read "Trade fast, die young." Ugh.
I think Robinhood does a great job of giving young traders the experience and knowledge of what actual trading is like before they're managing really meaningful amounts of money. College kids trading $500 on Robinhood are going to become 30 year olds who have a much better sense of how markets work and how emotion affects their own trading than college kids who are just instructed to give all their savings to mutual funds. I think RH has a niche and potential to really change things provided they don't do too much to incentivize dangerous behavior (like the deleted tweet).
Maybe, except the college kids who just give all their money to mutual funds will make more money. The day-traders won't "learn how markets work," they'll learn how to lose money by making dumb trades based on less information than their counterparties. They won't learn anything, aaaannnnyyyyything, of actual value.
College kid who started trading in RH a while ago here. After reading some basic investment books from authors like Peter Lynch, Taleb, and What Jim Paul, decided to get some experience in the markets. Invested a little saved and since then made a decent return, better than if that money was in a bank. So far, I'm doing better than the large-company mutual funds after 3 years, but as I've been reading, that's probably good luck.
It's been an interesting experiment that gave me incentives to learn more about financial markets, which I otherwise would not have touched. However, I started by reading and knowing a little bit, so I won't touch crypto trading until I know more.
> Invested a little saved and since then made a decent return, better than if that money was in a bank. So far, I'm doing better than the large-company mutual funds after 3 years, but as I've been reading, that's probably good luck.
The only thing you should be comparing yourself against is the s&p500, if you haven't beaten that, then you're down.
Also, the markets have been in an unprecedented bull run. Everything you've learned will be useless once the tide turns
Well, I don't think everything will be useless. Think it was John Maynard Keynes who said "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." While that quote concerned shorting a bubble, I'd say the principle holds for determining when a bull market will turn, as well.
While I'm 'beating' the S&P by 10% over my puny 3.2 year life, I gained more value from feeling the urge to trade during downturns, but resisting, seeing bad investments fade away (thanks, SolarCity), and effects of global events, such as Brexit and Trump USA. I would recommend trying stocks to people who can afford to do so as a way to really learn what books mean when they say there is an irrational 'fight or flight' instinct that individual investors have, not to mention the herd mentality of institutional investors.
I believe the unprecedented bull run is also a contributor to Robinhood’s success. Most of your mobile app day traders are going to drop off when the market turns bearish.
The fact you’re browsing HN and have read all those books probably means you’re not the average user (read more intelligent) of RH. Just read the RH subreddit and looks at all the novice questions the users there ask.
if the premise is that you can't make money as a day trader, no matter who you are, because the stock market is essentially efficient, then they aren't making dumb trades with less information, because all information is reflected in the price. What they are doing is accumulating more risk, giving them higher odds of fluctuating out, but the expected value is the same as holding mutual funds, maybe even a little higher, since mutual funds have administrative fees, and robinhood is free.
If that is not the premise, then it's not good general advice to tell people to avoid day trading as they won't learn anything. If the market is not efficient, then return on investment is correlated with your amount of information, and they will absolutely learn things of actual value, or at least their experience with trading will contain information about the strength of their hypotheses, regardless of whether they infer that information.
There are plenty of ways to learn the market without spending money as a day trader on Robinhood.
Most financial events are cyclical. Trading really hasn’t changed much since the late 17th century so reading a history book on financial speculation and market cycles would teach you plenty.
Another alternative is simulating trades without allocating real liquid to it. Watch how those assets evolve over time.
If the goal is attaining wealth then “wasting money” is probably a more accurate statement.
How someone decides to use their money is up to them. If emotional reinforcement helps them remember something then I suppose day trading is an option.
I’m only suggesting there are frugal ways to learn if your ultimate goal is to build wealth.
I agree probably 90%. If this had existed when I was in my first year of university and had a little money in the bank still, I probably would have thrown some at GOOGL when the Gmail beta came out.......
On the other hand, it could have got ugly. Hindsight is often 20/20 and young people can get competitive, over-aggressive, and dumb.
It took me until far more recently to even start to pay any attention to things like financial markets and trading.
We’re going to see a massive loss in money in the next crash. With low interest rates, everyone is in the market in some way. Mostly in index funds, bot traders, or things like RH. The next crash is going to destroy those funds as they try to sell off their massively overvalued stocks.
We’re setting up for a rough time. The baby boomer’s retirements and the millenial’s savings(in the market, not savings accounts) are going to get hit really hard.
When I was in college I made every dumb trading mistake there is.
I traded on emotion, bought high, sold low, with margin leverage, and with options.
Fortunately I didn't have much money then, so my losses were a large percentage but a relatively small dollar amount.
In hindsight all those losses were inexpensive lessons that have served me very well now that I'm older and have more at stake.
So let the young and inexperienced trade. If you protect them from themselves, you deny them the ability to learn at a relatively low cost, and they'll wind up learning later at a much higher cost.
I've been using Stash to invest in some EFTs. I've only put in $50 to date and will put in more since the market is doing well but I did it more as a learning experience.
What would be the best way to learn, for someone looking to invest $500+, who's never done much investing before?
Outside of ~10 shares of Starbucks stock given to me when I worked there in 2001, this has been my only experience.
P.S. Those Starbucks shared have been long-lost - somehow they moved them from Schwab to another company and no one told me where/how). I forgot about them until today.
EDIT: Looking at my docs, I bought 7 shares at $18.275 in April 2001. The stock price is $60.55 today. I need to figure out who holds these and see what I can do to reclaim them.
EDIT2: I found them. I found where the original account was, called them and got the details. Sadly, the account was marked as dormant and I learned about "Escheatment". The stocks were cashed and the amount is now held by my state and I have go through several hoops to reclaim.
There are two main schools for investing/stock trading. "Value investing" which is trying to buy company stocks that are undervalued and generally seeks to hold these stocks for a long time, and "technical analysis" which is focused more on predicting future stock price moves based on reading charts and is focused more on short time frame. Value investing is a more well-respected style but people have made enormous amounts of money from both. If you're interested in value investing I would just read everything warren buffett and charlie munger have ever created. For technical analysis I would just google it and explore and watch out for BS. Investopedia is a great beginner's resource for both.
To piggy-back on the other reply, since he went on recommending material for fundamental analysis, I'll go the other way and go on recommending material for technical analysis. If you're completely unfamiliar with the TA environment, I'd recommend heading over to https://www.babypips.com/learn/forex which is absolutely fantastic in your development of trading vocabulary.
After that, I would recommend reading Technical Analysis of the Financial Market by John Murphy, and books tailored to specific indicators (you can write me back if you wish and I can go more specific).
So do you think the “small retail investor” (Wall St. PC speak for “poor person”) should not be able to take the same risks as those of “accredited investors”?
Accredited investor status is a very non-libertarian idea. By forbidding a class of risks to the lower and middle classes, it excludes them from the corresponding class of rewards. When the lower/middle-class investor can only take a subset of the risks another investor can take, it means his money is worth less. The accredited status works as a gatekeeper against class mobility. In some ways it seems similar to disenfranchisement (“pass a test to vote,” “pass a test to take this risk”).
It's a lot closer to hunting licenses than voting tests. It's certainly true that preventing the unlicensed from hunting means that their rifles, freezers, four-wheel drives, dogs, and grills have less value than someone who is qualified to hunt. Yet hunters and non-hunters almost universally demand licensing because without a minimal set of knowledge, the risk that an individual is a threat to themselves, others, and the viability of the ecosystem, is rather too high compared to the potential benefits of unrestricted hunting.
From a more pragmatic libertarian perspective, one might also worry about the welfare claims that a person who is ill-equipped to make speculative investments and gets wiped out will make on society. One must also consider debts that they will fail to pay if they are forced to declare bankruptcy (one reason why stock exchanges never let you fund your account from a credit card—unlike coinbase). State-managed bankruptcy and welfare may be seen by some libertarians as incursions on liberty but they are also mechanisms that enable a higher degree of risk-taking and potential innovation from the same class of people who are restricted from some risky sorts of investing. Once you make these provisions you have to manage the costs, but its not clear that a classical libertarian prescription of eliminating state-involvement in bankruptcy and welfare and opening up speculative investments to all would improve class mobility.
The test to become accredited demonstrates that a person has the capacity to handle a failed speculative investment and is less likely to need to socialize their losses (obviously bank bailouts are a counter-example to the point I am making here, but that's just how schizophrenic our regulatory environment is).
It’s not just to protect the investor, but also to protect those selling the investment. Generally these are non SEC regulated securities, so the disclosure and registration rules largely don’t apply. Investors are expected to do their own due dilligence. It provides a degree of protection to the vendor from accusations of miss-selling, or missleading or not fully informing the investor of risks.
SEC regulations are there to protect investors. If the rules for trading my nn regulated securities were dropped, then there would be much less reason for securities to go through the registration process, undermine my the whole regulatory system, but ncreasing risk for everyone including the country. After all these rules came out of the aftermath of the Great Depression.
Think of it on the same way as retail goods quality control standards. If you buy goods in a store they must comply with strict safety and quality controls, but if you’re a business or dealer those rules don’t apply, for extample if you’re buying the goods to scrap them, or bring them up to standard and then sell on. Different rules apply to retail purchasers and trade purchasers.
>should not be able to take the same risks as those of “accredited investors”?
I would say yes. Well, he should be able, if he wants, but is it good for him, really? For example, options trading is useful for hedging large positions in stocks, so you can pay small amount to, um, hedge against corrections in a bull market. By hedging correctly, you can make some money in during correction while avoiding fees associated with selling your sizeable position and buying it back.
But options trading without having large positions in stocks? It's not trading, it's lottery. 1% chance of making 10x return and 99% chance of losing the whole bet.
I don't mind, but let's not pretend that options trading is opportunity in itself. Having ability to trade large sums is opportunity, access to options market is not.
> But options trading without having large positions in stocks? It's not trading, it's lottery. 1% chance of making 10x return and 99% chance of losing the whole bet.
That's a pretty naive statement. Have you ever traded options before? Because it sounds like you haven't. Options like most other securities allow you to chose your risk, everything from lottery type bets to mostly sure deals.
I did. Doing "buy and hold" or even riding FANG`s on some margin requires mostly discipline, and it's already hard for a lot of people. Consistently profitable options trading while managing risk so it won't blow up one day is a profession.
The amount of knowledge needed is on a whole different level.
You are technically correct, but again, we are talking about retail broker targeted to millenial audience. I would be very surprised if 1% of it's audience knows what straddle or butterfly means.
> emotional, irrational day trading among people who can least afford it
This is completely untrue on the face of it:
"Unless you have an equity balance of at least $25,000 in your account, your Robinhood Instant or Robinhood Gold account is limited to no more than three day trades in a sliding five trading day window [emphasis mine]. Exceeding the three day trade limit will restrict your account from placing further day trades for 90 days." [1]
As someone who actually day trades, being able to do 3 trades every 5 days is completely useless.
As an aside, sort of disappointed this is the top-rated comment when the evidence against this claim could be found using ~1 minute of Googling.
Did you read the last sentence of that article? "This limit applies to margin accounts (Robinhood Instant and Robinhood Gold), but not to cash accounts."
Also day trading is not a limit on total buys/sells - they're specifically saying it's a limit on buying/selling the same security repeatedly when they are lending you money in a margin account.
Per FINRA rules: Cash accounts are effectively limited to a settlement schedule (at least a day) in which the unsettled funds from one trade cannot be used for another trade. If the unsettled funds are used for another trade, it begins to count toward pattern day trading. Attempting to bypass the pattern day trading limitation with a cash account can also be subject to good faith violations.
So to follow FINRA's rules, Robinhood will limit cash accounts from pattern day trading as well as margin accounts.
The rules applied to margin accounts are stricter, but truly day trading in a cash account won't work for long.
You absolutely need to trade on the same security intraday many times in order to generate a profit as a day trader.
Buying a security, then buying a different security, then selling a third security tomorrow -- that's not day trading, that is just the normal flow of equity investing.
Unless you have a lot of money so you can be invested into many different names, you won't be able to do this very many times before you run into the limit, at which point, the rational person will open an account at a different brokerage instead.
The utility of 'zero commission trades' rapidly declines as you have more capital. If you have >$25k to put into a brokerage, paying $1-2 commission per trade (e.g. Interactive Brokers commissions), or even $5-7 per trade (most other retail brokers) is definitely worth the flexibility of being able to change your mind and reversing that trade without the risk of being locked for 90 days.
As for the addendum, sales in cash accounts are settled over several business days and you can't trade on those funds, so again there is no day trading there unless you're very significantly overcapitalized.
I think Robinhood's purpose is exactly to promote "emotional, irrational day trading." Isn't that part of what impacts the market anyway? There are tons of bad traders in any given platform, and you're right that Robinhood increases that likelihood but you can't exactly blame an app for poor trading motivations. That's a due diligence.
Everything from the marketing to branding/design to distribution channel is designed to encourage higher frequency active trading among retail investors. When you're using Facebook-like product design tactics to encourage "engagement" (in this case, more trades), then you're not a neutral fee-free brokerage but an active contributor to irrational behavior.
I would be less critical if they had a library of investor education materials, or required investors to go through a training course to understand the risks of riskier trades (i.e. margin or options trading), but as far as I know they don't have anything like that.
Ah, I didn't know they made money off that part of it. I suppose you give up some privacy/data when they resell your order, similar to using Facebook or Google. It's a slick business model, I didn't even realize it.
> Ah, I didn't know they made money off that part of it. I suppose you give up some privacy/data when they resell your order, similar to using Facebook or Google. It's a slick business model, I didn't even realize it.
Your also giving up better trade execution ie paying more for shares. Robinhood is good for getting your feet wet but people should switch brokers as soon as possible.
If all your doing is passive investing then yes a Vanguard account would be ideal. I'm not sure on the fees for chwab and fidelity so I can't comment on those. For my passive investments I use a Vanguard account for my trading(active investing) I use Interactive Brokers.
Yeah, I plan on moving my shares to a broker with the nice features like DRIP/partial share purchases and so on once I accumulate enough capital to make the $5 trade fees worth it.
If you can handle the minimum amount to open an account(10K) Interactive Brokers is awesome, Commissions are usually just a $1 in and out. If your under 25 then it's 3K to open an account.
> IB is good if you trade enough to make the monthly fee worth it.
Yea valid point. I make 2 to 4 trades a week so IB makes sense for me. Plus I signed up before I was 25 so my monthly fees are still only $3 instead of $12. Plus I do enough trades that my monthly fees are waived.
that's bullshit, sorry. If they sell your order to a firm with good execution, you could very well get a much better price than from a firm that doesn't sell your order flow.
I learned a long time ago that the solution to a problem is never a blanket ban on a product or tech. All that does is punish well-intentioned or needy people.
Trade fees are a relic, and deserve to die. They do nothing but skim money from smalltime players. Yes that also increases risk of gambling behaviors, but the solution is better education and treatment, not depriving everyone of a fair and low friction system.
I agree somewhat but there's no better way to learn how to invest than to try outsmarting the market for a few years.
Frankly the demand is ALWAYS going to be there for these types of services. And there are people that are actually smarter than the market. Robinhood is so much better than a lot of companies that try to attract those investors (like a site that makes you pay for day trading classes for example)
I'd rather have Robinhood than an app that charges fees, seems like a win for the consumer to me.
The demand will ALWAYS be there because Robinhood targets emotionally driven investments. This bullish market has also contributed to inflated egos around investing. Robinhood is now a fashionable trading application. If anything that should be a sign that we’ve entered a near speculative craze market wise.
Learning to invest well is like learning to drive. You can read up on it or try it out in a simulated environment but there's ultimately no substitute for doing it for real.
Developing a investor mindset free of emotional responses is fundamental and hard to do if there's not real money at stake. If Robinhood gives young people easy access to learn by doing then all the better to then.
> and small minority of knowledgable retail traders
"What if there are fifty righteous (knowledgeable) people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous (knowledgeable) people in it?" :-)
> "Trade fast, die young."
That's hilarious! I mean, until someone actually tries it, but for now, it's hilarious!
It is that queue of 150000+ that have signed up for a place in the queue for this that scares me.
More people could sign their money away on this to make the Tesla queue look like a lemonade stand. This has not happened before, we really are in new territory as people en-masse think they can get rich on this. Plenty actually are and all of them are telling everyone else to follow their example. This is a bubble but everyone is getting everyone to pump it up with a view to hold... Oh dear.
that may very well be really bad for consumers. If Robinhood sells to Citadel and Citadel has better execution than IB, you are getting worse prices on IB.
It does not work like this. You will always be crossed on NBB or NBA.
The concept of "bad" vs a national best bid or a national best ask can only come via order delay. Better execution via order delay as seen by a customer is always a lie as none of retail brokerages look at the order, look at the 100@101 x 100@101.1 market and say "ok, i'm buying 380K @ 101.09 from you" followed by posting the trade followed by trying to unwind position. Oh no, they simply present your order by adding it to the book.
No, that's incorrect. They can fill you better than NBBO if they have an internal prediction that NBBO is moving. Or they can fill your sell order at better than bid price, to be more precise.
Do you have any data to back your claims that small uneducated retail investors are struggling with Robinhood or are you just making these blue sky claims. Do you really think retail investors will look at Coinbase's 1.5% fee and be like nope, I don't want to invest there.
I for one totally welcome this move. Coinbase is making billions on their product with high fees (because of low competition) and this should even the playing field.
This sort of investing works well in bull market, and after an almost 9 run-up, I'm guessing we have a lot of younger traders who have not seen a bear market.
This is not going to end well for a lot of folks...
> Cryptocurrencies, stocks, ETFs, and options are now available side by side — all easily accessible in one app. Managing your investments just got even easier.
There is a dangerous theme of companies aimed at millennials that misappropriate Bitcoin (etc) as an investment, when it is just glorified currency exchange speculation. Blurring these lines obscures the real-world value created through actual investments.
A better question might be: How is anything an investment? If the stock market is priced efficiently, it is as much a gamble as Bitcoin. The stock market is of course not perfectly efficient, but it is likely extremely efficient relative to the knowledge of your average retail investor. Which means that buying Bitcoin or other cryptos is no more a gamble than any stock market investment with a similar volatility.
I also think the stock market is not "investing" but think it's safer to invest.
1. There's more government regulation and less manipulation.
2. New money is constantly flowing in, via 401K's and pensions. Most people aren't even aware they're invested in the stock market.
3. The government cares so much about the stock market doing good. Look at how Trump brags about the booming market. If it goes in a funk, the government will think of ways to prop it back up.
That said, without any of those 3 things, stocks are just as a gamble as bitcoin.
People say "past is not a predictor/indicator of the present", yet they love to say "stocks return 7-8% annually, and you should just invest in an index to enjoy such returns". Why? That's such as a huge assumption that everyone takes for granted.
> People say "past is not a predictor/indicator of the present", yet they love to say "stocks return 7-8% annually, and you should just invest in an index to enjoy such returns". Why? That's such as a huge assumption that everyone takes for granted.
Well, you're leaving out something something about the company putting your money to use to increase efficiency or output something something and something something about dividends from the proceeds, none of which you have with cryptocurrencies. (Though it may be disputable whether those are truly the reasons behind the historical returns of stocks and thus good reasons to expect it to continue, even if you wouldn't guarantee the exact numbers, or if those are simply motivated reasons that may or may not be reliable future indicators...)
Other than the IPO, when you buy stock you aren’t providing capital for companies to use though, right? and most companies do not pay dividends at all.
This is a common misconception. Companies often raise capital by selling more stock, and by buying stock you increase the amount they are able to charge.
Yep. No argument from me there. Most mainstream stocks are safer investments than cryptos, along a number of axes (volatility, counterparty risk, regulatory risk, etc..). But cryptos are still very much investments.
> If it goes in a funk, the government will think of ways to prop it back up
I don't disagree with the second statement. I guess what you're saying is that there is manipulation (talking about government intervention in this case) but overwhelmingly in the "right" direction?
Sure, yeah, the market is systematically manipulated to my benefit, and those manipulations are done in a largely transparent manner. That makes it a more attractive investment target than a market which is not.
What separates investing from gambling is the expected return for everyone is greater than zero.
AKA buy stock at 100$ and sell it at 100$ does not mean you broke even. You could have gotten 10$ in dividends. Now that positive may be small and some people may lose money, but that's allowed as long as the expected returns end up positive.
Bitcoin's can't have a net positive return because they only way to add money into the system is via coin buyers. Further because of transaction costs it's inherently negative sum.
Some cryptocurrencies generate the equivalent of "dividends", especially those based on Proof of Stake systems. For example, holding Neo generates Gas equivalent to a 3-6% annual return[0], and Stellar (given free to HN readers a few years back[1]) has "inflation" equivalent to around 1% annual return[2], to name two that Robinhood will be listing.
So are Berkshire Hathaway shares not investments, because you need to sell them to end up with money? What about a savings account with compound interest, or an ETF with automatic dividend reinvestment - do they not count as investments either, because you have to do something with them to get money out?
Don't forget that investing in the stock market is still something of a gamble, because the return for everyone is not guaranteed to be greater than zero - a company can go bust leaving the shareholders with nothing.
Berkshire Hathaway is something of an exception as the vast majority of successful company's pay dividends. Clearly, buying a single stock is risky. But if you buy a basket of stocks and those stocks pay dividends then the only way to lose money is for the socks to be worth significantly less money when you sell them thus making it a positive sum game.
PS: Berkshire Hathaway still returns money to shareholders via stock buybacks. Which preform similar functions the difference is simply related to taxes. They can and are likely to at some point issue dividends.
If I buy a lump of gold, and attempt to sell it to someone else later at a higher price, that is pure speculation. Gold is gold is gold. That lump of gold is going to be the same lump of gold a year from now or a hundred years from now. You might as well have buried the money in a backyard for all the change of affected in the world.
If I take that same money and invest it in a business -- the business is going to take that money and create something new. Hopefully what it creates will be worth more than what you invested, but in any case your investment has changed the world in some way.
I think a cryptocurrency is probably something in between that, because your 'investment' is actually ultimately going to miners who will expand the network, so you are actually building something new in a sense by investing in cryptocurrency. However I'm not sure that building the bitcoin network out is a net positive for the world.
> If I take that same money and invest it in a business -- the business is going to take that money and create something new.
Only if you're buying at the IPO. Most of the time, you're just buying stock from another person and the company gets zilch. The service you're providing to the company is just better information about its ability to raise additional capital from selling equity.
For some cryptocurrencies, you are providing a service to the miners by adding liquidity and pricing information, but given the volume trading on crypto exchanges, there is simply not enough currency being mined for even a tiny fraction of it to be going directly to miners as a counterparty. For a currency like Ripple, that is completely pre-mined, you don't even have that.
The company is also a shareholder and can pay out dividends or buy back stock to increase the price. One pays you directly, and the other increases your stake by diluting the pool of outstanding shares. Both are direct results of actions taken by the corporation, and both create something new: cash and equity, respectively.
I have trouble seeing what this has to do with my comment, which was specifically on the notion that investing money by buying a company's stock somehow helps the company, which is true only in the very narrow sense that I indicated.
Which would change nothing as gold is not an investment.
Also, if you 1 one bitcoin you can only sell less than 1 bitcoin from transaction fees. Remember, someone needs to spend real money maintain servers and that money is constantly being removed from the coin ecosystem.
Untrue. You can sell someone the private key to your wallet. That's free. If you're not going to classify commodities or real estate as investments, then sure, I guess bitcoin isn't an investment. But it's as much an investment as any commodity or real estate is.
real estate pays a dividend in the form of use of that land.
If I own a house I get to use the house today and still have a house tomorrow. With a field I could grow crops and then still have a field next year.
Commodities are an interesting 3rd thing. But, closer to buying something from a wholesaler than an investment as they represent actual goods (ie Oil) that will be sent somewhere. Think of it like this, if you buy coffee contract you get coffee which can be sold off. However it's a physical thing and it's got a physical expiration date, if you keep it in a pile somewhere for 10 years you end up with dirt.
Bitcoin provides a service though - a service that has demonstrable economic utility. Specifically: international value transfer. There are existing mechanisms for this (western union, swift) and they have costs. The sum of those costs is a reasonable way to think about Bitcoin's theoretical value by substitution, because it costs bitcoin to move bitcoin. And therefore if Bitcoin were to replace all other intl. value transfer mechanisms, the sum of those two sets of costs should be comparable.
Owning bitcoins don't facilitate these transactions by third party's. The service can create value but don't let the name of the service be confused with the coins.
You could speculate that the utility created will increase the value of the coins you hold. However, unlike mining there is no connection between buying a coin and enabling other people to do these transactions.
Smart contracts absolutely can, just like regular contracts can. A bank granting a line of credit backed by future sales unsold gas station inventory is money showing up from 'thin air'. Move that to a smart contract and you've got money - that is, a promise to deliver future real value - getting generated.
Try and write a loan on Etherium via a smart contract.
I apply, get eth, cashing out by selling it to someone else, then get hit by a buss or just ignore you.
Now, in what way can the system enforce that loan?
If you can get the eth from someone that gave me money then they are not going to give me money in the first place. If you say, sue someone in the real world that's fine. But, the smart contract did not actually do anything. If you say I need to put up eth as collateral then you did not give me a loan.
I don't know much about ETH, but would it be possible to write a contract using an escrow concept? I.e., there would be a wallet that eventually would pay out to one party in one circumstance, and to some other party in some other circumstance. (If you want to get complicated, it could even blend payouts among multiple parties.) We wouldn't have to trust you not to get hit by a bus, because the value wouldn't be in your wallet.
If they went to the work of creating digital contracts and didn't consider escrow, that seems to be a fairly significant omission.
Ah, ok, I think now I better understand the point you made above. I can accept that value per se is only created by one or more parties, but the coin itself can make it easier for them to do so profitably.
First of all, yes they can. Proof of stake coins pay dividends. Second of all, dividends from companies don't show up 'from thin air'. They show up from the economic activity of the company. Which is facilitated by their capital investments. Just like staking in cryptos.
Lets say I Buy '1,000' tokens including a 10 token payment for a transaction fee for 1$. Now A had 1,000 tokens and now has 1$, I have 990 tokens and another group get's 10 tokens. But, notice that other person(s) got tokens not money.
If I got to keep 1,000 tokens or someone else get's those 10 tokens nothing changes because nobody who has tokens got any money. The only way people with tokens get money is if they sell some number of tokens minus a fee to someone else. It does not matter of all 10 tokens go to a miner, or miners get 5 tokens an 5 go to 'investors' or what not.
It's still a (edit: negative sum game) and contracts don't change anything about this.
Bitcoins and USD may both be tokens, but they are not the same token. The same is true of say WoW gold and ISK (EVE Onlines money). I can farm WoW gold all day, that does not turn into ISK unless someone is selling ISK.
What about stocks with no dividends (which constitutes the vast majority)? By your definition, only dividend investing and rental property investing is true investing.
I'm not disagreeing with you. In fact I almost agree with you, but your argument fails for most stocks.
Stocks with no dividends have some probability of paying a dividend (or doing a buyback) in the future. If you could prove that a company will never pay a dividend or do a buyback then its value would be zero.
this is turning to a very insane argument.. So if Buffet signs a iron clad legal contract that says no dividends ever for the duration of his company, it means the stock is worth 0?
If the dividend-less companies are profitable, then you can still expect the increased value to get returned to you through stock buybacks, or an eventual dividend or acquisition of the company in the future.
The difference is that with investing, you have a reasonable indication where your investment will end up in the future. Chances are, in 10 years Walmart is still going to be profitable and continue to pay out dividends. There's no telling what will happen to Bitcoin in the next week, let alone the next year, so it's a gamble to put your money in Bitcoin.
Do you not see how you are contradicting yourself?
"Chances are" alone, is an assumption. How is that any different from your speculation on Bitcoin. The only difference is longevity of the window period, otherwise it's the same principle.
There is always going to be some degree of uncertainty with any action. Just because a meteor can fall on your head if you walk outside doesn't make it a gamble to do so. There's a fine line between investing and gambling, but the extreme ends of the spectrum should be obvious.
I'd argue that the difference between investing and gambling is that gambling has known negative expected value, whereas investing is uncertain. If it is not known that the outcome of a gamble has negative EV, then a reasonable case can be made that it is an investment.
If the market is priced perfectly efficiently you will still make money because your capital is put to work. A perfectly efficient market just means you can't beat that intrinsic rate of return.
True. But that is irrelevant to the original point: Cryptos are as much investments as any stock or commodity. And anyway, that future expectation of profit ought to go into risk-free treasuries unless you want to gamble on a specific, higher risk asset.
Yes, but money in the future is valued at a discount today. So even if an asset is 100% sure to be worth $100 a year from today, the market will value it at slightly less than that because there's no sense tying up $100 in capital for a year unless you get some profit in return.
stocks give you ownership in productive companies. those companies on average go up in value and produce profits which they throw off as dividends (or re-invest to increase their market-cap).
so one difference then is that stocks have a justification for their returns given the variance you experience.
I would tend to subscribe to a similar view and think that no, gold is not really an investment. A hedge, a gamble perhaps. An investment is something that (hopefully) enables useful work and productive endeavour.
Putting money into a company in return for a share of ownership is an investment. A lot of stock market shenanigans are little more than gambling. Gold and crypto-currencies for the most part are speculation.
Although it's not always clear with ICOs if any form of ownership is conferred or what the relationship might be between future profits and token gains.
But yes, in principle.
--edit-- to be clear, I'm not trying to say one class of thing is better than the others, just that to me the words have different meanings.
"An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative."
-Ben Graham, from chapter 1 of The Intelligent Investor
>If the stock market is priced efficiently, it is as much a gamble as Bitcoin.
Well... we're just shoving a poor definition of investment off onto a poor definition of gamble. If potential drawdown could be considered part of the risk of 'investing' )or 'gambling') then Bitcoin is definitely more of a gamble.
If the stock market is perfectly efficient, standard financial theory says that equity has a positive expected return (relative to the risk free asset).
Correct that it's not entirely luck, at the moment its price is being propped up by Bitfinex. Whenever BTC value starts to dip below 10K USD, they just print more Tethers (USDT) and start buying up coins at above market price...and there's a new upswing.
blackjack tables are based on supply and demand. the margins on blackjack are ~51% in favor of house. if they don't get enough traffic, a swing could take the house. So if there isn't enough demand, than it's not financially feasible for the house to play those odds.
Bitcoin isn't backed by an asset. It's not really backed by anything other than people's expectation that it is worth something now (and it will be worth more in the future).
This is true even for the miners, since they would not build out infrastructure and burn energy if bitcoin was worth zero.
Imagine a raffle where tickets cost $1. After the winner is drawn, the house agrees to buy back the first few losing tickets for $0.99, the next few for $0.98, and so on until they work down to $0. The players don't stand to lose everything in a moment, but it's still pretty clearly gambling.
When you put money into blackjack you're not buying an asset. A crypto coin is an asset that can be held. Just like a share of a company, or a dollar itself.
yes but it's a bad analogy because the odds are known and if you don't win the lotto the ticket is worth nothing. all bitcoins are equally valuable ( fungibility ).
But all cryptocurrencies are not equally valuable, and there's no reason to think that all of any given crypto won't eventually equally be worth (arbitrarily close to) $0.
I can imagine a lottery where usually nobody wins anything but every now and then everyone who bought a ticket wins collectively. It's still a lottery.
With stocks, for example, I can make a prediction about a company's future performance, buy or short accordingly, and expect that if I am correct I will profit.
I may be wrong about my prediction, but if I am correct then I've got far better than chance odds of also being correct about the future price of the asset.
Without making any further predictions about the state of the world I can equally easily imagine the price of Bitcoin in 5 years being $100 or $100,000. Neither price feels "wrong" the way it would if, say, Google's stock price rose or dropped by an order of magnitude without the company changing anything.
A bitcoin is as real as anything else. It's ones and zeros stored in a distributed ledger on computers around the world. I'm sorry you're having trouble predicting the price, look up supply and demand. Either way it doesn't make it any less real.
I don't dispute that a Bitcoin is a real, discrete thing. What I'm arguing is that it's a self-contained thing. The price of a Bitcoin is not anchored to anything outside the Bitcoin ecosystem.
With other assets, there's a clear causal arrow leading from outside the system back in. If Google the company performs better, Google the stock will overwhelmingly tend to perform better. If Google the company folds, Google the stock will overwhelmingly tend toward being worthless. The asset is a proxy for something that isn't the asset.
Bitcoin doesn't appear to work the same way. There's no obvious not-Bitcoin that demand for Bitcoin is a function of. It's a proxy for itself, after a fashion. That doesn't mean it has no value, but it does feel uncomfortably self-referential when compared to almost any traditional asset class.
Crypto's value is derived from its usefulness as a currency. It has many advantages over current fiat systems. You can expect if it's practical adoption expands then it's value will go up.
Company has assets that can be liquidated. Even if people decide a company has no value there's still assets that can be liquidated to provide capital back to shareholders. If people decide a crypto is worthless, its worthless.
If you asked that question to Warren Buffett, he would probably point you to Benjamin Graham's distinction between investment and speculation:
"An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative."
I think when he said " real-world value created through actual investments " - the underlying idea behind an investment is that you provide capital to someone who is trying to build a business that will hypothetically provide jobs and value to society. Putting money into something and taking more money out is a bastardization of the term in that interpretation. That is simply not the case here - this has simply been a mass wealth re-distribution event. People are basically printing and trading pokemon cards at this point.
Providing capital to someone does not only occur in the IPO stage. I'm not even sure how to go about refuting that statement; that's... not how finance works anywhere on the planet.
People do trade stocks with the expectation of stocks rising or falling in varying periods. People also hold stocks for long terms and then sell them afterwards. Just like cryptocurrencies!
However - it's just not the same. A share in a company has evolved and subjected to regulation for hundreds of years. An IPO is a highly regulated legal process involving investment banks and many lawyers (and that is how it should be - so that we don't have con artists running ICOs). It is sold by a company that generally provides jobs and services to society. It represents an actual piece of ownership in that company - if you have enough shares, you impact how that company is run. There are many other points I could make differentiating the two comparisons entirely.
First, let's ignore cryptos because I'm talking about IPO's only (albeit the thread is about cryptos)
"Providing capital to someone does not only occur in the IPO stage. I'm not even sure how to go about refuting that statement; that's... not how finance works anywhere on the planet."
First, I provided that statement in the context of the parent comment. In the equities market, providing capital occurs only in IPOs, not in the secondary market. When you buy Apple stock, you typically are exchanging money with another person who is selling it. You are not providing capital to Apple.
Second, you could've gone about refuting my statement by providing a counter-example. It's that easy. Otherwise you're simply just trying to put me down, and make me look like an idiot, without explaining why.
Yes, Apple is not receiving any money if there is a share transaction between two investors (duh?). However, providing capital to public companies or does not only occur in IPOs (edit: even if we restrict that with the clause: in an "equities market").
You're right, I could have provided a counter argument. However, at the same time, you should not make such an absurd, unqualified assertion that other people who lack knowledge and are reading these forums may read and assume to be true.
Investing connotes some kind of exchange for rights, usually equity. When you invest in say APPL, you are buying a stake of the company. Bitcoin, like the $US or € doesn't make anything. Bitcoin is not an investment, you're just speculating that it's exchange value will rise.
There are different definitions of ‘investment’. One is forgoing present consumption in the hope of increased ability-to-consume in the future. Another is purchasing a productive asset.
I would be extremely wary about trusting robinhood now. I have a stock account with them and back in October I used their new feature to transfer stocks from other brokerages. However, there was never any selection for _which_ stocks you wanted to transfer so it transferred all of them without confirmation. After 4 back and forth support emails each taking multiple days to hear back on I finally gave up with them and got Vanguard to transfer some of the stocks back. Robinhood responded by deactivating my account until the transfer was complete, which it did a week later. Here I am mid January still waiting for my account to be reopened after creating a new support ticket for them to respond to.
Robinhood seems to be pulling in a lot of different directions and there's all these "early access" features that never seem to actually, well, launch.
I've now signed up for:
* Web access (otherwise it's mobile-only)
* Options trading
* And now, cryptocurrency trading (because why not)
and I haven't gotten access to any of them yet, even though Robinhood for web has been in "early access" for quite awhile now.
So I signed up for this, but I have very little faith that I'll get access any time soon (even with the vague promise of early February).
I remember being in a startup that promised features before they could deliver, and how it was a symptom of shoddy business practices in general. So when I consider the fact that I have a decent amount of money tied up in Robinhood, and I see them promising features without delivering, I get uneasy.
Otherwise it's a great product. I'm really only writing this in the hope that a Robinhood person catches eye on this comment and takes it to heart.
I'm really confused about why web access hasn't launched yet? Would think that is the easiest of them all and entirely in their own fate. Options and crypto seem like much more complicated endeavors but a website, ffs.
people will not spend more money trading on a website. not having one is an inconvenience. options and crypto are more places for people to put their money
I blame Apple. No, really. When Robinhood first launched it was intentionally targeted at iOS users, hence the almost automatic focus of building an app vice a mobile friendly progressive web app. Then the push to target Android users - but since "we do apps" is already the corporate mindset, the next thing is not a web page, but yet another app. Eventually they get around to the web.
A company I left a few years ago went down the same path.
I'm disappointed in Robinhood. They've done great work making equity investment approachable to people who are traditionally alienated by it. Their mission, "[...] to democratize the American financial system." caries fantastic social value and generates a lot of good will for them.
Entering cryptocurrencies IMO runs counter to that mission. It's a cash grab which will expose their users to poorly-understood risks and will likely not put anyone on a more stable financial footing.
> It's a cash grab which will expose their users to poorly-understood risks and will likely not put anyone on a more stable financial footing.
That's already the case. Their entire user-base is comprised of naive stock market investors. If they really wanted to bring about a more stable financial footing for their users they would just offer dressed-up ETFs.
Or they want to offer their customers a no-fee way of buying cryptocurrencies as easily as stocks? I think this is a great move by them. There's no question that a growing number of investors are demanding access to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Don't use it if you don't want to. But literally millions of American citizens are getting into crypto right now (looking at Coinbase's numbers). And if this is an emerging area, I don't see any problems with them coming in.
I feel most negative comments on this thread are from folks who missed the crypto train last year and are just bitter and trash any new development in this area.
I think the feature makes lots of sense for Robinhood from a business perspective, but I cannot see the majority of Robinhood users fully understanding the risks of buying cryptocurrencies as an investment. It feels similar penny stocks and late-90s tech IPOs in that the price is driven primarily by uncertainty/unknowability in outcome and hype from recent returns.
Also I'm curious if Robinhood Gold (Robinhood's version of margin accounts) will work here, letting people easily borrow money to buy cryptocurrencies. This seems particularly dangerous for a product targeting small/layman investor.
I agree that margin trading on Cryptocurrencies is extremely risky and not fully understood by the majority of people doing it. I am very anxious to see what will happen in the long term since so many people hopped on the bandwagon in the past 2 months and I believe a quite large portion of them went into credit card debt to do it. I have been telling people I know personally that I thought Coinbase allowing the use of credit cards to purchase was asinine, and I am curious to see what will happen.
Capitol One is now blocking all coinbase transactions, and Chase is now running them as cash advances, so the credit card companies are aware. I think there may be a large amount of CC defaults due to cryptocurrency "investors" realizing they are in over their heads in the coming months.
I wonder what the thinking behind the name is. It seems like a bad idea to entrust your money to a startup that is named for someone who's famous for "stealing from the rich".
I think the idea for the original product (I.e. non cypto) is that it's target the "little guy" with no commission on trades. So people feel like they're taking from the rich institutional investors.
I think something that rhymes with "Bells Largo" would be a good place to start!
Or if you're going for the sweet investor moneydrop, go for something like "Sharing Economy". That says "We steal from the poor and give to the rich" like no other!
Here is a thing about Robinhood: it does advertising in ineligible countries, apps are allowed to be downloaded, profiles must be filled in down to the last field and only then there is a message saying that you're not allowed to use the app because it's unavailable (really?) in your country. Guerilla data collection at its finest.
As a very happy user of Robinhood financial, this really does look exciting. If you’ve not used robinhood, and have a little interest in investing, I’ve found their simple interface to be very nice to use relative to the more heavy weight options I’ve had experience with (etrade, schwab, fidelity).
I didn’t see how their crypto offering would allow me to transfer my wallet from Coinbase to them, do I create a new wallet, and then send money from one to another? If so it’s unfortunate that I’d need to incur transaction fees to onboard.
The main draw for me is no commission fees on virtually any stock or ETF.
Although I did just try to buy SPXH (S&P500 + Volatility Hedge) and for some mysterious reason it was "not available for trading on Robinhood", even though it's an ETF with a not-miniscule AUM ($50M). I pinged their support about this, and it took them over a week to get back to me to ask what type of security SPXH is.
$50M is a minuscule AUM for any ETF, especially one meant for trading (volatility hedged vehicles are not good for buy and hold). Institutional investors, Hedge funds, etc will not touch such an illiquid fund.
Coinbase bought GDAX. GDAX fee structure is different from Coinbase. Coinbase is geared towards consumers and they take bigger fees for buying. GDAX is geared toward professionals and take way less fees for buying and selling.
My point is that things like Bitfinex are far, far from being mainstream consumer iPhone apps. Combined with the massive credit bubble we are in (any warm body with a 600+ credit score can easily get tens of thousands of dollars in credit cards within an hour right now), this is precisely how speculative bubbles run out of control and crash the economy.
I found it useful, it's a good start. Perhaps if you had more context about the toolset you would not find the lack of documentation the thing to comment on. Also, there are better ways to engage in communication than leading with negativity.
So who is responsible for Robinhood's orderbook? Are they partnering with an existing exchange to fulfill market/limit orders? Are they simply paying for the trading fees on behalf of users?
If Robinhood isn't posting their orderbook, why would anyone trust that there are no fees or commissions when they could bake their costs directly into the price? There's no market regulation (a la Reg NMS) for cryptocurrencies, so who's to say that the user isn't getting screwed on price and allowing Robinhood to take their cut?
But if they are partnering with an exchange, why pick one over the other? Who will pay for the withdrawal/transaction fees?
> so who's to say that the user isn't getting screwed on price and allowing Robinhood to take their cut?
Are you referring to market orders? I don't understand this. If I place a limit order for 1 share at $20. And the order gets filled at this price; where do you think Robinhood is taking a cut? I think the strategy you mention could be possible with market orders however.
Well for one, cryptocurrencies (at their current prices) can be divided much greater than simply "1 share". I'm saying that the price that Robinhood sets is dependent on orderbook price which they control.
Example: you buy $20 USD worth of BTC on Robinhood. They give you 0.001750 BTC.
But on other exchanges, you would have received 0.001812 BTC instead. The differing price of BTC between exchanges gives them their "commission/fee".
The lack of transparency in pricing gives them the advantage in exchange for retail consumer confusion over "zero fees".
Wooo this is awesome! Robinhood gets it :) I already use Robinhood for trading, so this would be a one stop shop. Plus the fact that it integrates with TurboTax means there's zero work to pay taxes on trades. Keeping track of the taxes is my biggest hassle trading crypto.
They are launching tracking options for 16 coins and actual trading only for Bitcoin and Ethereum. So it might be a while before you see all 16 on Robinhood.
Unrelated to cryptocurrencies, did Robinhood ever managed to roll ability to trade US stocks outside US? From this [1] (almost tree years ago), looks like they started with Australia, but that is it.
Anyone can suggest sane brokerage with API access allowing trading US stocks, ETFs or options for non-US citizens, with minimal deposit? I'm aware of Ameritrade; how about other alternatives?
I don't think they are making the market themselves, but my understanding is they are paid for order flow from those who do. I can only imagine the data is worth quite a bit too, assuming their EULA allows them to sell it.
It will be interesting to see how they allow people to fund their accounts. With their traditional investments, they have to follow tradional rules with respect to credit. But a more "accessible" and leveraged model like Coinbase, would be a stark departure from their normal modes of operation.
My guess is if you want to withdraw it off Robinhood you'll have to pay a standard network fee (Robinhood isn't taking a cut of that). They don't charge fees for trading, though.
Does anyone know what happens in the event that a brokerage like robinhood fails? Are the assets insured by a federal agency or is it wiser to switch my portfolio to another broker?
> Robinhood Financial is a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) ...
> Robinhood Crypto is not a member of FINRA or SIPC. Cryptocurrencies are not stocks and your cryptocurrency investments are not protected by either FDIC or SIPC insurance.
All of the assets you have in Robinhood aren't actually held by Robinhood; they're held by Apex, which is a huge firm that many companies use. If Robinhood goes down, your assets are still with them and there'd be some reasonable way to transfer them to another brokerage.
If Apex goes down, which is vastly more unlikely, Federal SIPC insurance kicks in up to $500,000.
Exactly true for stocks, but I don't think Apex or any equities clearinghouse is clearing cryptocurrencies (exception: clearport for CME futures). So we're left guessing as to whose balance sheet holds the crypto assets.
According to all that light print at the bottom of the website, up to $500K in securities are protected... and all your crypto belongs to whoever manages to grab it, sue all you like afterwards.
(Pure speculation warning) I was wondering why they were taking so long to put out their options trading and web UI. I wonder if this had something to do with it.
does anyone know what is their revenue model? i found this in wikipedia:
"The company makes money from interest earned on customers' cash balances and margin lending."
I was expecting a new cryptographic library and/or algorithm, and was looking forward to 33 highly technical comments about how it compared to ECDSA or something.
Just because the title is technically accurate, doesn't mean it's useful. An ideal headline should accurately and succinctly communicate the contents of the page it links to.
Buy incrementally, hold. If all markets are tanking, cash to USD, wait for the blood bath to be over. Otherwise you are gambling.
Accessible crypto is going to be a disaster simply because of unregulated markets. My friends get shakey when they lose $100 in the market, this is going to be "Weak Hands: The App". Or "Taking Candy From A Baby: The App".
I had to lose ~$200k over the course of a couple months and only after then I started really getting into the swing of things and started making good money while also making it back. It took all that to realize that if I didn't day trade my yields would have been much much higher. Day trading is hard, don't do it unless you really truly know what you're doing. Reading crap about market psychology and fractals and fibonacci this and wave theory that is all trash and does not make you a trader.
Here come the 'I lost my life savings' rants by people with weak hands. Regular people + unregulated market = blood bath.
It works very well for short-term trading on cryptocurrencies, still waiting to release the longer term strategy (buy and hold is honestly a great choice). We've just started revewing some of the results (since we launched last week), and we're already up stagaring amounts:
Anyone trading with a rangebound bot will have made money in the last two weeks with these stagnant prices. The heavy regret for me set in later when my rangebound bot sold Litecoin and Ethereum before they tripled.
Note: It is in Beta, and we have limited data. Thus, expect a work in progress.
Right now we need funds to continue development and add more data. So we will be charging if you don't provide feedback - so please help us improve! :)
Now they are "democratizing" margin trading (Robinhood Gold), options trading, and crypto...no professional investor who actually knows what he/she is doing is going to be served well by a mobile trading app - this is a play for the mostly uneducated retail investor (and small minority of knowledgable retail traders) who has no idea what they're getting into when they buy a call option in X or trade btc on margin.
I remember seeing on their social a now deleted tweet that read "Trade fast, die young." Ugh.