Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Schwab is an ethical company, in stark contrast to most banks and other financial institutions, that view their customers as revenue opportunities to be harnessed for maximum profits. Happy customer for years.

View on HN

I don't know that I personally would use the adjective "ethical" to describe Schwab---that word can be taken so many different ways.

They are certainly a much better company to do business with than, say, Wells Fargo, and have largely avoided being completely terrible. Of course there was that nasty fiasco with the YieldPlus fund a few years ago...

Perhaps customer-oriented is closer to what I was thinking. Turns out you can also make good profits taking good care of them.

They're certainly one of the two best for-profit brokerages (the other being Fidelity). Vanguard is inherently customer-focused, unlike the for-profits. Schwab and Fidelity are great today, but a future CEO/board could come in and decide to squeeze customers, and then you're somewhat stuck. Moving funds is difficult and if ERs are bumped, you have to balance taking a capital gain against the ongoing ER cost.

I've never had difficulty moving ETFs between brokerages.

If you move a Schwab ETF to Fidelity, you're still paying the Schwab ETF expense ratio (for example).

> Vanguard is inherently customer-focused, unlike the for-profits.

Vanguard is for-profit; it's just that every investor in a Vanguard fund is a part owner.

Yes, I could have described that a bit more accurately; sorry.

I was a happy customer for a long time until they broke their web interface to the point I couldn't use it anymore. I tried everything. Finally I tracked down the bug to a particular line of javascript, emailed customer support with exact instructions how to fix it.

They did nothing. Never fixed it, so I had to move to another broker that had working software.

I had that same problem (pointed out a stale cookie issue that prevented me from logging in). They fixed it and tossed $50 in my account.

They also used to truncate passwords at 8 characters without making that clear to the user. If you are someone who uses a passphrase you might have set your password to "PasswordCorrectHorseBatteryStaple" and entered that whenever you logged in, but anyone could access your account by just entering "Password". I tried on multiple occasions to be escalated to or referred to someone who would care, but no luck.

I've found that their website does just randomly break in a browser occasionally (like several times a year). As in, I will not be able to load even their homepage. It'll generally resolve itself within a few hours and in the interim, the iOS app works fine.

Definitely concerning though.

Yeah, I still like Schwab, but their web interface has gotten much worse. Until about a year ago, it was spartan and blazing fast. For getting things done, it was way better than any other bank or brokerage website I'd seen. Then they moved to an AJAX laden monstrosity that makes a million requests to render a single page. It's slow and clunky, and in some browsers it doesn't work at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com