It’s a great product, if you ignore their willingness to fuck you over.

Now I would say is cheap access to margin, UX, and availability of options trading. However those advantages have since been matched by other brokers. Therefore the substitutions are widely available and RH will see an exodus IMO. I already have an IRA and 401k with Fidelity. I will be moving my equity account to them in a few weeks to avoid having a week or so dead period.

I set up an account last week just to play around with it and see what $10 could do. It took like 90 seconds from download to purchase of a stock, and everything from there was rather simple.

...which is the problem. My 18 year old nephew could do this with no problem, and he shouldn't be. Hell, I shouldn't be, hence why I deleted it yesterday.

But I have an account adding to that I plan on using to buy a designer handbag since HYSA is so fricking low right now. Not a true YOLO account, though money I consider just as good as flushing money down the drain on a bag once a year. Gotta beat Chanel’s price increase and .50% in HYSA ain’t cutting it.

Also fractional shares. Schwab has my actual equity account and they only allow fractional shares on S&P 500 stocks, not on ETFs or bonds.

However, if this is what it takes to get more people activity saving and investing, then I’m comfortable with the downside.

This just makes it easier.

I agree on the saving part, but investing is a tricky one - a lot of these instruments are easy ways to watch money vanish in a hurry (single stocks, etc). I agree to a certain point people should be allowed to make their own informed risks, but there's also a lot of predation coupled with "I got rich! you can too!" marketing in this and cryptocurrency.

I don't like the gatekeeping of the big firms either, but there's something to be said for structure and sane investment advice.

Dollar cost averaging into a diversified allocation of funds isn’t gambling over a ten year period. Over a week, it’s certainly gambling.

I complain a lot about my market-bro-culture friends, but I think it's probably because they skew to salivating over individual stocks, speculation, etc, vs a sound strategy.

And that's what gets the eyeballs - people see get-rick-quick-buy-this-one thing vs "boring invest in a mix of index funds and some risky ones that will let you retire and not eat canned soup".

I have no doubt it's perfectly possible for the person with the time and research, but I suspect these tools get their profits from the former, not the latter. Also, not everyone has the time or appetite (which is why a lot of end up picking the "retire 2050" in our 401k vs individual selection).

I'll also confess that if you give enough of your financial blood to an investment person, you do get access to slight advantages. Not Warren Buffett levels, but more favorable conditions.

Six of us:

Two trade their own capital as their primary source of income. One is a beast, one makes about $200k a year.

One works at a bank as a trader, so he is limited to index funds (he can’t hold an individual position for more than 30 days)

One is a pure yolo gambler. He will go all-in with over $100k on a single trade for a week or two at a time.

I’ve always invested in a disciplined asset allocation model. Only recently have I started with individual stocks, and it’s mostly to have fun with these guys.

The other I’m not sure about his investing strategy.

I say all of this to highlight that even within a group of finance professionals, there’s a wide range of investing styles. Everyone does what they think is best/ they are comfortable with. If people want to yolo their savings, more power to them.

There's a huge difference between encouraging millennials to invest a couple hundred in a long term fund and sending them in blind to day trade. The problem is when a 20 year old thinks they're Warren Buffet and can predict which stocks are the-next-big-thing-bro.

You've identified the inherent risk with all transactions in which people are allowed to spend their own money. People think cigarettes/hookers/blow/video games/baseball cards/designer purses/really great Italian wool socks/NDNation subscriptions/a college degree/etc. will make them happy, successful, rich, or some combination thereof.

They are frequently wrong at least in part and sometimes ruinously so. And there are reasonable, compelling arguments for limiting what people are allowed to do with their own money in the ordinary course.

But you get into dirty words---that is, words thought dirty by contemporary general consensus---like "paternalism" very quickly doing that. It's a steep climb to mark out straight equity purchases as uniquely morally hazardous in a marketplace that is mostly moral hazard (the position may be easier to establish for unlimited-downside transactions like some options). The argument sounds at first blush like fairly routine snobbery or protectionism on the part of the moneyed class.

Really great Italian wool can definitely make a man happy . . . then I saw you were referring to socks.

I get that the initial focus has been on fast returns. That’s the nature of equity investors. They trade stocks because that’s where the money is. They aren’t interested in grinding out 8% a year in a large cap value fund. They want tendies.

That said, none of this is new. The only difference is the method used to trade. It’s gone from calling your broker, to using your modem via AOL, to trading online, to app based trading.

What we should be concerned about is why so many people feel left out and feel that they need to yolo to survive. But that’s a different conversation.

Oh you played options and now down several tens of thousands? Don’t feel sorry for you. Should understand the risks with YOLO.