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