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Comment by justinzollars | Hacker News Reader

This is great news for small investors like me. I like to constantly buy, but the etrade fees were cutting into my margins. Their numerous tax integrations kept me attached to the platform. I won't be moving to RH

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For an unsophisticated rube investor (not trader) like myself, who wants to put a little bit of every paycheck into equities, RH is a superior product.I can wake up the morning my paycheck posts, transfer funds, and buy a couple of shares in seconds using my phone/tablet while I am in bed. Clean, simple, easy.

I looked into other products, but felt that none of them addressed my particular use case. Felt like they were designed for someone very different than myself. Anyway, if there is some good alternative I don't know about (which is extremely likely), please suggest.

Plain old mutual funds. You can buy Vanguard funds fee-free from Vanguard in whatever dollar amount you like. Been that way for decades.

This, exactly. The only "flaw" of Vanguard's admiral funds is the $3000 minimum. For many of my friends, that is a bit of a high hill to climb to get started. Then again, those same friends seem to think nothing about speculating on whatever the hipster cryptocurrency is, so perhaps they have a different set of issues they need to address.

The target date funds have a $1000 minimum and are quite reasonable options for retirement or general diversified investments. The expense ratio is slightly higher, but if you have less than $3000, the difference is miniscule.

Or you can buy ETF versions of Vanguard funds. Same expenses as mutual fund versions, but the minimum purchase is 1 share. Free to trade from a Vanguard account (or something like this Schwab account, since its exchange traded).

Yep, the advent of ETFs has made it a lot easier to get started. I hadn't thought about the target date funds, that is a good thought.

Your friends can start off buying Investor Shares in the fund(s) they like. Once they hit the Admiral Shares minimum, they can convert over to them[0].

Many of their funds also have corresponding ETFs, and I've found that most (all) have similar or lower expense ratios, and the minimum buy is a single share (of course, you can't buy fractional shares like you can with mutual funds, so that can be annoying).

[0] https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/convert-to-admira...

Vanguard has gotten rid of a lot of their investor-share classes of mutual funds. VTSAX used to have a $10k minimum. Now it has a $3k minimum, which used to be the amount to get the equivalent investor shares fund.

https://pressroom.vanguard.com/news/Press-Release-Vanguard-L...

$3000 is definitely a hill, but wouldn't they need to at least climb that hill to put away a safety buffer /before/ putting any post-tax money into equities??

Just this morning when I woke up, I opened the Vanguard app, bought some shares of VTI, then got out of bed and went on with my day. You can do the same exact thing with the Schwab app (I have accounts at both).

One reason I dislike Robinhood is that it seems to encourage speculative trading behavior as opposed to a proven long-term investment strategies. I don't care about free commissions much, because the only equities that I care about (index fund ETFs) are already available for free. I don't care at all about buying individual stocks. I don't care about buying cryptocurrencies either. And I don't care about cash management (y'know Robinhood, I have a real bank account that is actually FDIC insured, unlike the half-baked "savings" accounts you tried to sell us on) So for me, I actually greatly prefer using a more traditional brokerage that offers me exactly what I want and has a proven track record.

Schwab makes it even easier if your paycheck goes into their bank account. You don't even have to wait for a transfer :)

I don't like their cash balance for their robo-investor. But then again most "robo-investors" are 100-500 line python lambda scripts that run on timer if a hypothetical trading api module existed

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