There’s not much I can say that I know about the stock market except for the age old saying that “what goes up, must come down.” Or, at least, that’s what I’d of said two weeks ago before I downloaded the Robinhood app, finally watched The Wolf of Wall Street, and saw that Amazon just bought out Whole Foods for upwards of 13 billion dollars. Holy shit.
(Also, I’m having some serious doubts about that silly old saying, because honestly? I don’t think Amazon, Google, or even Microsoft will ever crash and burn. At least not within the next millennium. They pretty much own our asses.)
While I’d love to ramble on about how Kroger is most likely royally fucked and how awesome it’s going to be to be able to finally have my goddamn groceries delivered via Amazon Prime drone delivery, that’s not what this post is about. Although, now that I think about it, Kroger and most of the other grocery chains will probably be alright since it costs $6 for a small jar of asparagus water (????) and probably like $12 and half of your life expectancy for a carton of eggs, but that’s beside the point.
So back on topic.
Stocks.
I’ve always had an interest in the stock market, but I’ve never really understood it much. It’s just… weird, to be honest. And after finally watching The Wolf of Wall Street last night, there’s one particular exchange from that 3 hour hot mess of money, sex, and way too many drugs that actually managed to not-so-eloquently put my concerns into words that made sense:
Mark Hanna: No. Number one rule of Wall Street: Nobody – Okay, if you’re Warren Buffett or Jimmy Buffett – Nobody knows if the stock’s going to go up, down, sideways, or in fucking circles, least of all stockbrokers. It’s all a Fugazzi. You know what a Fugazzi is?
Jordan: It’s, uh… “Fugazi”, it’s a fake…
Mark Hanna: Fugazi, Fugazzi. It’s a wazzy, it’s a woozy. It’s [whistles] fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s Neverlanded. It is no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not fucking real. Stay with me. We don’t create shit. We don’t build anything. So if you’ve got a client who bought stock at 8 and it now sits at 16, and he’s all fuckin’ happy. He wants to cash in, liquidate, take his fuckin’ money and run home. You don’t let him do that, because that would make it real. No. What do you do? You get another brilliant idea. A special idea. Another “situation”. Another stock, to reinvest his earnings and then some. And he will, every single time, because they’re fucking addicted. And then you just keep doing this, again and again and again and again. Meanwhile, he thinks he’s getting shit rich, which he is, on paper. But you and me, the brokers, we’re taking home cold hard cash via commission, motherfucker!
What did I take away from that? That stocks don’t exist; they’re not real, they’re basically worthless fake monopoly money, at least to stock brokers. Also, I learned that stock brokers are fucking ruthless assholes, holy shit.
Which leads me into my next point.
The Robinhood App.
A few years ago, when I got my first job working at Walmart, I decided to give stocks a try after coming across the existence of OTC penny stocks. I had no idea what OTC really meant, though I did know it was risky. Regardless, for .019 cents per share for a particular stock that I can’t recall the name of now, I said “why the hell not,” opened up a TD Ameritrade account, and went to town with $50.
To keep a long story short, not only did I lose the $50 that I initially invested, but I actually managed to somehow miraculously be down around -$80 when I hadn’t even invested that much in the first place. It wasn’t the stock that screwed me over, but the trading fees and the “margin call” fees, which, fuck if I knew what the hell those were supposed to be. So I ignored it. 6 months later I log back into my account just to see what’s going on, and I notice that I’d been since hit with another margin call fee as well as some other fees for reverse splits, bring me down to -$113! What the heck!
The point I’m trying to make here is that I had no idea all these fees existed, let alone what a margin call or a reverse split was supposed to be, and I learned the hard way. I’m just glad I didn’t lose anymore than the initial $50 I invested, because fuck TD if they think I’m paying them anything else.
Burnt, I figured stocks just weren’t for me. Until recently when I decided I should give it maybe one more shot, after learning some of the basics about stock trading and downloading the Robinhood app, which, honestly I thought was too good to be true with its promises of being completely and totally free.
Spoiler Alert: It really is free.
No trading commissions, no account maintenance fees, no minimum deposit or charges for bank transfers, no charge for its (very minimalist) analytics, etc. etc. Of course there’s an option to pay for upgrades, like to have a margin account since all Robinhood accounts are cash accounts by default, but everything that you need to get started trading is literally FREE. Plus, the app is sexy as hell. Yowza.
I’ve been using it myself for the past month, and all I can say is that it’s awesome and I’ll never use a traditional broker ever again. I mean, I probably won’t ever be able to really afford one, but whatever. Robinhood rocks.
Another perk? You can get a free stock just from signing up under their promotional offer. No jokes, no gimmicks. The only catch is that you have to wait 30 days before you can cash it out if you want to just take the money and run, which is totally understandable. I unfortunately wasn’t able to get one since I downloaded the app myself without having signed up under the promo (I hadn’t known about it at the time), but my friend, on the other hand? He got a Microsoft stock worth $70. Insane. I’d put the link here to the promo, but I don’t know how long it’d be active for, so I suggest just doing a Google search for “Robinhood free stock promo” or something similar.
Anyway, I’ve never been one for brevity, as can be observed by this ridiculous jumbled mess I call a blog post. But either way, I just wanted to share my thoughts on Robinhood. I’m thinking about looking into day trading soon, but first I’d like to save up some money before I try something risky like that. In the mean time, I have a lot of my eggs in Delcath Systems’ (NASDAQ: DCTH) basket, and so far I’ve made upwards of $100 in profit. Not much, but it’s a start. I’m expecting for that to rise in the comings days and weeks due to the recent Delcath-related news, but that’s another post for another time.
PS: Screw you, TD Ameritrade. I’m actually making some money with Robinhood!
AKS.
Neurotic Finance 