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Comment by laser | Hacker News Reader

If someone with $30,000 in savings makes 30 stock transactions per year at $10 a trade, they’ve lost 1% of their total to fees, $300. If they’re expecting 7% annual returns that ends up reducing earnings by 14% per year. The math for the masses is pretty straightforward.

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Interative brokers charges considerably less https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=1590&p=sto...

They also have super cheap margin loan rates.

They charge $10 a month if you have less than $100k though.

Someone with only $30,000 total invested should not be making 30 charged transactions a year.

Out of curiosity, if there are no fees, why not? That lets you theoretically diversifying your risk by investing $1,000 in 30 companies rather than say $5,000 in 6 companies.

An index fund would be yet more diversified, and that's one trade. Very few individual investors have any reason to believe they can pick stocks in a way that outperforms the market.

The zero fees might still be nice if you want e.g. to contribute every paycheck; but an old-fashioned Vanguard mutual fund would be just as good for that, or many brokerages have zero fees for specific classes of ETF. The only advantages that I'd see to Robinhood are (a) no minimums, and (b) pretty UX.

That's a fair point. I use Robinhood to diversify my porfolio so it's not just tracking against the market. So far, whether due to luck or skill, or both, it's been working out pretty well. So to put it another way, I don't see Robinhood as a replacement for the traditional brokerages (yet), but as a supplement.

A good reason would be dollar cost averaging. If you have a monthly transaction split across 3 index funds, you're over 30 trades per year.

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