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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this would be a good idea for Amazon. I don't trust it right now to provide me things that aren't counterfit unless its sold by the actual supplier. Allowing funds to be on its platform without proper vetting seems strange. If Amazon actually wanted to go into the Asset Management space I would actually see it buying something like Robinhood. The problem in Asset management is all of the people who would regularly be retail investors are too smart to be peddled a bunch of random mutual funds and instead try to use index funds. The margins for those are already cut to the bone. I don't see how they could compete with something like Schwab intelligent portfolio either.

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> I don't trust it right now to provide me things that aren't counterfit

That might be true for a small percent of HackerNews readers that are also Daringfireball readers - but the world at large still trusts Amazon; that's the whole point of the article, really.

As anecdotal evidence, an Amazon Investment might be the only way to convince me to become a Prime member (if that'd be a required precondition). I'd almost certainly use it, if allowed.

I don't know, I've seen a lot of trust erosion in the last few years even just among people I know (many of whom don't even work in tech), largely driven by them getting burned by problems with sketchy third-party re-sellers.

Unless you're paying close attention, it's not obvious to the average consumer that so many products are being sold by independent resellers vs Amazon themselves, so people aren't as careful as they might be on, say, eBay.

Amazon's reputation is starting to converge with Walmart imo.

so, I trust amazon too (at least the 'shipped and sold by amazon' brand... I consider everything else to be more like ebay)

But... I just don't see how amazon would get me away, say, from vanguard. There are already good retail brokerages, and I don't see why I'd want to go through amazon instead of another company.

There are lots of ways, of course:

A. Going global: a lot of those "good retail brokers" are US-only. Sometimes it's dumb - I already have an ETrade account & signed all the paperwork including stuff relevant for my foreigner status... But ETrade will only let me trade my employer's stock, nothing else.

B. Bundle stuff that others can't match - e.g. Prime

C. One account, with good actual security (few appreciate that but some will)

D. Maybe new financial products that others can't match (I think Amazon is in a position where they might pull that off)

You have some good points, especially about scaling the international stuff, something I hadn't thought of. That does sound compelling

but B? I don't see why I want to bundle my stocks with my television series. And, I'm not sure Amazon has security that is any better than Vanguard.

I don't think Vanguard's security is better than Amazon's [1]... Technically they could be more secure than Amazon despite running stuff on AWS, but still, I'd say Amazon's track record on security is pretty good - and pretty much the entire Enterprise world relies on it.

[1] E.g. they obviously run stuff on AWS: http://www.vanguardjobs.com/job/7980466/ts03-cloud-architect...

I find that... terrifying

Brokers are often limited in which countries they'll accept clients from, but that's to avoid all the overhead of filling the appropriate tax forms to each government (and maintaining the knowledge of what the rules in each country are).

That's exactly my point - Etrade already does all the tax forms for me, I don't understand why they won't allow me to have a full account. Probably some "blanket policy".

As for Amazon, I would expect them to eventually expand globally if they were to offer such services (which is not what I expect from most US brokers).

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