Comment by ianhawes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianhawes | Hacker News Reader

There are countless controversies involving Robinhood.

One that I only learned about a few days ago involves an investor who was erroneously shown a -$700K balance on his Robinhood account and then killed himself as a result[0].

Back in September of 2019, I made a deposit into Robinhood. The next morning I received an automatically generated email saying that the deposit had bounced and that my account was now limited. I checked my bank account and saw that the funds had indeed been removed. The email included the ACH error code "R26", which corresponds to a malformed ACH file. I quickly learned that every single deposit on that date had failed [1].

No worries, I thought, I'll just email support and let them know. Unfortunately their support was completely useless and did not follow through with what they said.

I switched to TD Ameritrade (and the thinkorswim platform) and have not looked back.

I think Robinhood needs a sort of Uber-style restructuring. It's clear they do not care about their clients.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/06/17/20-y...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/d0joa2/solution_...

Robinhood did not show an error in that first example, that was an option spread where one leg was exercised and waiting on the other. It’s the whole reason for using option spreads and any other broker would show the same.

Stories like this are why I've stayed away from Robinhood. After doing more research before starting any trading, I learned that I can buy stocks through Vanguard, which is a platform that I actually do support a lot.

One question I have is: what's a safe, secure, reliable alternative to Robinhood for buying crypto as an American? I've read about Coinbase and Binance but seen that some people have had shady experiences with them too.

sofi is an alternative I've heard about

No company has perfect service but Coinbase has always done right by me. Great security and super easy onboarding. Whenever a friend asks me how to buy crypto, I send them to CB. My only criticism would be the lack of some coins with real value and communities like Monero, NANO, or NEO.

Thanks! Is the process like with traditional trading, where you transfer money into the Coinbase account from your bank, and then buy whatever? Do you transfer coins to a physical wallet?

Yeah! You'll connect your bank account and do some security verification. Once approved you can buy whatever you want.

Although depends on what you mean by traditional trading. If you want see details charts and create market orders or limits, things like that, then you'll want Coinbase Pro.

Coinbase is great for easy buying and then holding there in your wallet. You can either leave your coins on Coinbase or transfer out to a hardware wallet like Ledger or Trezor. If you go the hardware route, stay away from Ledger. Pretty solid wallet but the handling of their customer data break was pretty unfortunate.

When their servers were under heavy load, you could attempt to place and it would error, but then you would get an order confirmation later saying it went through. The best part is that even though it didn't execute, you weren't able to cancel it because the transaction didn't display anywhere.

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