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Comment by AcerbicZero | Hacker News Reader

Remember ~6 months ago, when RH had that little "glitch" that let traders access essentially unlimited leverage? Stuff like that is why RH is a meme, and options trading has become wallstreetbets favorite game. Its not like RH even makes it particularly easy to setup these kinds of trades, or has any useful tools that make it a better platform. If you want to setup a put spread, or an iron condor, or any other fancy options trading strategy on e-trade its a few clicks away. On RH? Not a chance, you're going to have to build those strategies yourself, one leg at a time.

I still love gambling on RH, but you have to know its gambling before you start. I feel bad for this kid, getting caught up in the hype and throwing away his life over a few dollars that really never existed anyway.

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When you are trading options on some of the more popular underlying, e.g. weekly expirys, there are strategies such as iron condor, credit spreads, strangles, straddles, etc. This doesn't seem to appear on the web application and only the mobile.

It's weird how much functionality is missing from the web client. I could not even find my account and routing number, I had to use the mobile application.

Lots of companies are moving away from full featured web clients. I think Venmo recently removed the ability to send money -- you know, the entire purpose of Venmo -- from the web client.

The reason (probably only reason) RH is successful/popular is because of their $0 transaction fee. I wouldn't use it if I had to pay for anything.

I never understand why people are _so_ desperate to save a few bucks when risking their life savings versus using a professional tool if they desire to trade options (say, interactive brokers).

You save fees and then get screwed when Robinhood is down on expiration day.

If you're trading in small amounts, the comissions add up pretty quickly, a $10 comission on a $1000 purchase of stock ends up being 2% of the price, considering you have to pay to buy and to sell. That's way better than a $30 comission from the before times, but it's still big.

That said, we can all thank RobinHood for driving comissions down to zero, and then do business at brokerages that work. I personally wouldn't trade at IB, because I only do a tiny amount of trading, and don't want to go into the rabbit hole of individually routing my orders; it's great that it's available, but I don't need that, nor do I want an API or stuff.

I was speaking less about options trading and more about general adoption. I've never done options trading, just small-ish buys and sells. My experience with e-trade was a flat 10 dollar txn fee, which was totally unreasonable for the amount of money I was investing.

For someone like me who's only tossing $2,000 into stocks to play around with, having zero fees is the #1 selling point, otherwise, the fees add up to a significant fraction.

Pretty much all the big brokers are at 0 now.

I suppose it might be worth reexamining. Last time I used etrade it was a flat 10 dollar txn fee, which was absolutely ridiculous for people like me who just play around with funmoney. Robinhood was perfect for my needs.

The mobile app is a true mobile first app, but other than the UX theres no reason to stick with RH over Schwab, Fidelity, Etrade, Merrill, Ally.

But, is there any value add to casual investors like myself vs. RH?

Depends what you consider value. Better customer support? Trust? Price improvement. A suite of more products. Being able to call and get any issue resolved immediately, with strikingly intelligent answers for customer service, and a customer first attitude, is priceless.

Not for options, I think it's only Robinhood, tastyworks, and webull.

Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and Fidelity all now offer commission-free trading

You can actually set up any of those strategies in a single trade with multi-option select if you know how how they are composed.

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