[nyrulez]

This is cool. There is a lot of hesitation to move significant assets from my Charles Schwab brokerage account. That's going to be my main hurdle. I need to understand the safety, trust, trading mechanics, flexibility that I have with Charles Schwab, all of those things become very valuable when talking about high amounts for retirement purposes. I don't really know what you can do there to attract such clients? Will anyone move $5m from their top tier brokerage to Double yet?

[jjmaxwell4]

"Will anyone move $5m from their top tier brokerage to Double yet?"

I have!

But I understand that yes this is a hard thing to get people to move and trust, safety and trading mechanics are incredibly important. We are trying to be as transparent as possible on all those factors. I would love for you to try us out with a smaller amount first to see observe all the mechanics before making a larger move. We support full and partial ACATS transfers of existing stock positions (meaning you don't have to sell anything).

[TuringNYC]

>> There is a lot of hesitation to move significant assets from my Charles Schwab brokerage account.

I'm incredibly double-minded about this. M1 offers essentially the same service and they do it very well. I've compared M1 vs Fidelity Basket Portfolio (which also offers yet almost the same service.) Here are my takes

- M1 is easy to use (mostly, though same super-strange UX choices)

- M1 is a pleasure to use

- M1 doesnt fail on the main features

- M1 Baskets of Baskets gets complicated, but understandably so.

- Fidelity is better in some ways as it allows trading anytime, not just on specific windows as M1 does (this can also be a downside for itchy fingers)

- Fidelity Basket Portfolios is broken 30% of the time. Their OWN buy function fails any time they cannot get a quote for any 1 member of the portfolio

- Fidelity: It is absolutely a headscratcher how, in 2024, Fidelity can have trouble getting quotes for liquid public stocks during market hours (e.g., the other day, their buy of an entire pie failed because they could not get quotes for "DVY" which is highly liquid

- M1 fails absolutely miserably on back-office functionality. Selling losing lots is almost impossible without major Excel wizardry since the accounting info is held separately in APEX

- M1 fails dangerously on things they should never fail on -- for example setting beneficiaries has been a 4-month journey and still remains unresolved. If you dont have a will, get prepped for Probate! Worse, the failure is a silent failure as it suggests on the UI that beneficiaries are set. You get different answers from different people and each wants to help you but runs from "complex" issues (in M1's case, they are designed to have a single account, so their backend features fail if you have multiple accounts (e.g., a RothIRA and a non qualified account.)

The dangerous, infuriating, and befuddling experience with setting beneficiaries on M1 lead me to stick to the majors (Schwab, Fidelity) because at least I can rest assured they have the basics solidly figured out. It also makes me very hesitant to go to startups for this sort of stuff

[dmoy]

> accounting info is held separately in APEX

So the good news is that M1 doesn't use apex for clearing anymore

The bad news is that... things got worse? After they swapped to doing clearing in house, they dropped like a month of incoming wires without reaching out at all, until I noticed on my monthly login. Turns out that they had changed the underlying wire instructions (makes sense), but sent an email saying that nothing would change on transfer instructions (not true).

Then the next month, they still dropped wires even with the correct instructions, because... ???? unknown reason. Again no contact, until I reached out and asked wtf. Third month, everything worked even though nothing was changed from the prior month.

So there's a reason why I won't put more than SIPC worth in M1 or any other new fintech. And yes, it's backend incompetence as the primary reason.

[jjmaxwell4]

I'd love to earn your business.

[TuringNYC]

I'd love to understand why this feature/product requires an entire startup. I dont mean to be dismissive -- obviously it does, as shown by my experience with Fidelity Baskets given they cannot achieve it!

Also, I used FolioFN and ShareBuilder for years to do the same and they seem to have flopped despite having a compelling product. I'd love to understand why such an obvious feature/product with sound alignment to financial recommendations cant seem to do well in the marketplace!

[dmoy]

The only thing I use M1 for is to automatically purchase a 60/40 split of VTI/VXUS with any available deposits, so if double can do that, then maybe I'll check it out. If y'all are gonna charge a monthly fee down the road though, it's probably not for me.