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Comment by foobaw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

It's a very good app for buying up small (50-500 dollar) blocks of ETFs to hold, which is what I do. Thanks for the free trades, VC guys.

Robinhood makes money on execution (through exchange maker-taker fees [1] and reselling order flow to hedge funds or market makers).

It's in their best interest to promote more volume to increase revenue. They're making money of each and every trade.

[1] for example https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=bx_pricing

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.

Why not just get a vanguard / schwab / fidelity account then and buy their no fee ETFs?

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.

But I execute maybe, 4 trades per year. E-Trade / Ameritrade / Scottrade are good enough, and offer me Options trading and other useful features.

Like a website, so I can trade on a computer properly damn it.

> 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.

that's a bizarre complaint for a brokerage. Every brokerage exists to make money on trades.

Not saying it's bad, I just wanted to note that the VCs don't need to subsidize your trades on Robinhood.

Thats pretty smart.

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