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by roymurdock 3968 days ago
RE: short-term trading - all of the same time constraint rules apply (wait 3 days to transfer funds in and out, settle trades, etc.) as they do to a regular retail account which makes funds in the account too illiquid to be used for very short/risky plays.

RE: No portfolio/beta analysis - this is a huge problem for me and I can't understand why they would intentionally not build at least a simple portfolio tracker in so you can analyze your investments over time.

I use the app because I don't want to pay the fees, but I've taken to tracking investments in excel which is annoying when it would be pretty trivial to add functionality to the app.
1 comments
larrythedog 3968 days ago
Robinhood definitely takes the cake for ease-of-use, but companies like Interactive Brokers offer very low commissions, and a much more comprehensive tool. May be worth checking out if you're a somewhat sophisticated investor.

As for your response to the short-term trading concerns. Transfer restrictions don't really matter here. I can still buy/sell stocks as much as I want. I don't have to cash out to my bank in order to trade SPY 10 times a day.

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roymurdock 3968 days ago
Sure, if you have enough settled funds to make 10 substantive trades in a day.

Say you have 10k of settled funds in your account. You can make a total of 10 $1k trades of SPY throughout the day, or 100 $100 trades. Your account is effectively frozen for the next 3 days as the trades "settle" and you are unable to do anything with them. So you would have needed to cash out of your bank 3 days prior to have active funds ready to go for the next day.

AKA Robinhood gets 2-3 days to earn interest on your unsettled/uninvested funds.

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lewisl9029 3968 days ago
I've found Interactive Brokers to be rather unfriendly for long term investing due to their minimum monthly activity fees though.

But to be fair, they do advertise themselves as a platform for active traders, and the monthly minimums can be waived with a large enough account. I don't qualify for the latter yet, but once I do I'll probably switch over to IB if Robinhood isn't in Canada by then (You can't really beat free).

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