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Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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).

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

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