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Comment by skellera | Hacker News Reader

If someone only uses Robinhood for normal stock trading (no options, crypto, etc), is it better than using other discount brokerages that charge fees or are there reasons the other ones are better?

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I think for usage like you describe, Robinhood is hard to beat considering you want to pick a single equity and buy/sell it. If the goal is to hold stock for a long period of time, what other brokerages offer on top of equities is their funds (some of which, I think, are also available to trade through Robinhood (?) but can also be traded for free on their own platforms).

The other thing you get with a typical brokerage that you don't get, as far as I know, with Robinhood is customer service.

As alluded to in his final point, with IB, you can loan your stocks for people to short. This can yield you a substantial revenue stream for stocks with high short interest like TSLA. IB splits it 50/50 (fact check me on this) whereas I assume RH doesn’t even give you the option and uses it for their revenue stream.

TFA says a gain of 7bp. I wouldn’t call that “substantial” in any sense of the word.

> This can yield you a substantial revenue stream for stocks with high short interest

(emphasis mine)

7bp is an average. The article also points out that the yield occasionally goes as high as 100% per year.

Tesla stock costs under 2% a year to borrow from IB to short it. (source: short TSLA, IB customer)

Free is hard to beat. Also keep in mind you could dump your excess cash elsewhere than the broker, right? As long as you're not margin trading, you don't need any cash buffer lying around.

If there's some savings account or bond that pays you a bit, you can stick your cash there.

Might be easier to access via IB, which seems to be a more complete offering, but I haven't actually checked what you can access there.

You could always buy a ultra-short-term bond ETF within the account if you're planning to float a non-negligible amount of cash.

That was going to be my next question: what kind of fund should the "cash" go into?

Money market funds would likely be appropriate (I believe Vanguard actually does this for you, rather than keeping cash lying around).

They do. Though note that VMMXX (Vanguard Prime Money Market) pays a bit more than VMFXX (Vanguard Federal Money Market.) VMFXX / Federal is their default settlement fund, so if you have large cash holdings it is still advantageous to put it into alternate funds.

Unrelated question: VMMXX has a higher yield (2.35% currently) compared to VMFXX (2.29%) but also has a higher expense ratio (0.16% vs 0.11%). Do these cancel each other out?

No, the yields are net of expenses so VMMXX is still slightly higher performing.

Not just margin trading as you also need cash available if you want to open a new position quickly since a new transfer/deposit takes a while to clear. This is not making a claim on whether trying to time the market is a good idea.

I appreciate Schwab's other retail banking services, and like having my traditional checking/savings accounts under one roof. Makes moving money in and out of my brokerage account fast and simple. They have free checks and ATM fee rebates. Paying $5 per trade doesn't hurt much when you're 1) buying/selling very infrequently and 2) moving several thousand dollars at a time when you do.

Robinhood doesn't have customer service. If you need any kind of service that isn't accessible through the app, you're pretty much out of luck. That's why I only use it for stock picking as a hobby, and not for retirement savings.

Also, you don't get paid interest on uninvested cash balances. Cash in my Schwab checking and brokerage accounts automatically earns interest. Vanguard sweeps cash balances into one of their money market funds. But Robinhood pays nothing, and pockets the money instead.

> But Robinhood pays nothing, and pockets the money instead.

Obviously nothing stops them from paying interest, but they did try that whole Federally insured deposits with interest stunt a while back before the commissioner stepped in to say 'na bro.'

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