IFB148: Brokers to Avoid in 2020

Announcer (00:00):

You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners, led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern. To decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion, and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now.

Dave (00:35):

All right, folks, we’ll welcome to the Investing for

Beginners podcast. This is episode 140 tonight. Andrew and I are going to talk

about which brokers to avoid in 2020. Andrew has some stories you’d like to

share with us, as well as I do. And we wanted to talk a little bit about some

of the brokers that we’ve worked with and some of them we’ve had some success

with as well as some that are you need to avoid. So I’m going to go ahead and

turn it over to Andrew, and he’s going to go ahead and start our little

diatribe here,

Andrew (01:04):

Diatribe. It’s, gets it done. So I guess let’s talk about

the big one first. Let’s talk about Robin hood, one that neither of us has

personal experience with; however, many, many people have. And I guess if

you’re not a part of forums where Robin Hood is a popular platform, you might

not be aware of the issues that have happened. So I think we should bring light

to that cause it can have some serious implications for investors, particularly

because we get so many questions about Robinhood. Like still, even though

we’ve, we’ve covered Robin hood in the past on the podcast, I still get

questions about that all the time. It tends to be one of those brokers that

attracts a lot of new investors. And so be aware of what some of these brokers

don’t offer compared to what some of them do because there’s a big difference

between a good broker and a bad broker. And it could burn you at the worst time

when you’re not expecting it. So Dave, tell us about some of the things that

have been happening with Robinhood lately.

Dave (02:10):

Okay. Well, there are three things that I am aware of as

far as issues that they’ve had recently. And when I say recently, I’m talking

about in the last two or three months. So two times that they have had issues

with their platform have stopped. No has stopped working completely where

people have not been able to trade buy or sell anything on their platform for a

period of time. So with all the craziness that’s been going on lately with the

stock market, there have been several days where people have not been able to

sell any of their companies or by any of their companies because they have lost

the ability to them to do anything on their platform. So that in itself is a

huge problem. So let’s say just for example, you’re in a company, a Tesla, and

you see that the stock price is falling from $800 a share to have, I have $100