> I'm not 100% familiar but doesn't this app allow you to re-invest your paper gains without actually having anything material

I can't parse this sentence.

You can 'reinvest' non-settled funds. This is the definition for any margin account. "Paper gains" is usually in the context of paper trading, which the app doesn't allow. So this doesn't make sense.

Your link is not working for me, but the case for that customer was a lack of understanding, he didn't really owe 730k. It was a temporary balance. Which is the kind of thing you need to understand if you are trading options.

> We're all told to invest, so it's only natural for millennials/GenZ/etc to want to do that. Everything costs money,

Robinhood is mostly used for 'gambling'. If you want to invest, you should open a boring account in Vanguard, setup automatic deposits in VSTAX or similar (or manually on VTI), but otherwise forget about it. That's investing.

Playing around with short term market fluctuations is either trading or gambling.

> so if you can "make more money out of the money you already have", then that's quite appealing.

And yet that's what people do. If you are not doing the same, you are doing yourself a disservice.

This concept doesn't only exist in stocks. For instance, take a savings account. It appreciates over time. The reasons why are left as an exercise to the reader.

> As if creating money out of money makes any mathematical sense.

But it does. It's not about money creation, it's about wealth. Wealth is being created all the time. This is why the long term market tendency is always up. The moment we stop creating new things is the moment this will stop.

Since you are on Hacker News, read this, by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

> I think in the end, all these "investment" apps are really just shuffling money from users. How else can you "make" money without taking money from someone else?

Congratulations. You have discovered trading. Someone buys, someone else sells.

Note that this is only a zero sum in the short term.

> Everything costs money, so if you can "make more money out of the money you already have", then that's quite appealing. As if creating money out of money makes any mathematical sense.

Do you have a job? Does your employer make money? Aren’t they “making money out of money” by paying you?

The use of capital to generate wealth is one of the basic features of our society.

Let's dig a little deeper into this.

You're exactly right that they are making money out of money by using me. But me, myself.. I am not making money out of money. I do not have enough money to make more money out of what I have. I get money by exchanging my labor with my employer for money.

In turn, the company takes what I make and sells that for more money. The company is who is truly "making money out of money". The less they pay me and/or the more they sell, the more money they make.

If you do not have sufficient capital to begin with, you cannot make more money out of money (i.e. you cannot generate wealth)

When the company makes money, that’s actually the company’s shareholders making money. If it’s a public company, you can be one of those shareholders by investing in the stock market.

I assume the largest shareholders have the most money. I work for close to min wage; if they raised my wage, the shareholders will get less money off of the work I do.

What I'm trying to get at is that if you already have wealth, you can turn that wealth into more wealth. But people who do not have tens of thousands of dollars a year to "invest", they cannot become wealthy. This is why I say apps like RH or other "investment" apps or the lottery prey on poorer people. They lower the barrier of entry where we spend what little we have on the dream of becoming wealthy, when in reality, it is our wealth being taken from us.

> But people who do not have tens of thousands of dollars a year to "invest", they cannot become wealthy.

I agree with that - the average rate of return on capital is not high enough to turn a poor person into a rich person. At best it could help you retire after many years of labor.

> They lower the barrier of entry where we spend what little we have on the dream of becoming wealthy, when in reality, it is our wealth being taken from us.

If you make safe diversified investments in Robinhood, your money isn’t being taken away. It’s just going to accumulate slowly. Robinhood is a much better actor here than a shitty fund with 1% fee load, where a lot of workers are encouraged to save their money.

If you can do much better than the average rate of return, by starting your own company, or picking the right stocks through some special knowledge, you could actually get rich, but the odds are that you fail. Robinhood does harm by encouraging people to engage in this behavior.

How does a person become rich? You mentioned shareholders, so that's one example we can explore. They get richer off the work I do by selling what I make/provide for more than they pay me to make it.

If they paid me more and kept the exchange value of the produce/service the same, then the shareholders wouldn't profit as much while conversely giving me more money. By the shareholders exploiting my labor less, I can be richer.

If I have enough wealth, I could start a company as you suggest. I could be like the shareholders where I pay my employees as little as I can get away with and selling for as much as I can. This would help me and my shareholders turn money into more money.

But again, it is only through the exploitation of others that this is possible.

Another example of getting rich is owning property. If I have enough wealth, I could own not one, but two homes and charge rent to people who need a place to live. As they toil away at whatever job they're doing, I get this "passive income" that greatly increases my wealth while stunting wealth growth of my tenants.

We all want to be rich, but not all of us can be rich at the same time, otherwise, none of us would be rich. It's in the definition of being rich: to have more than others. But to have more than others, you have to exploit them.

And, tying this all back to your first comment describing one of the basic features of our society: using capital to generate wealth. You can imaging that this basic feature of our society makes it such that wealth clumps together. The more wealth you have, the easier it is to grow that wealth; it's like a positive feedback loop if you're into systems engineering or a massive object if you're into space. And having no money or no wealth is actively bad, and you can probably model a negative feedback loop of that, with the ultimate outcome of death (there's probably some good charts showing life expectancy vs wealth/class out there that illustrates this).

This is just an observation of the society we live in. It might be obvious to you, but it's cruel to me and many others who toil paycheck to paycheck living in fear of running out of the little money we have.

> If you make safe diversified investments in Robinhood, your money isn’t being taken away.

Sure, Say I invest $1200 over a year. How much would it "grow"?

Also, that's $120/month.. what if I need the $120 immediately and can't invest that much.

I guess my question is, How much money do you need for RH to be worthwhile?

Your assumption that wealth is zero-sum is incorrect. If I run a homebuilding company, building ten homes with 10% profit margin so I can afford to keep a home for myself, I haven’t deprived anyone of that home. I used the price of nine homes to buy a bunch of wood, concrete, and human labor and turned those inputs into ten homes. It’s not zero sum - the amount of wealth in the world actually increased.

Nations with economies that encourage capital investment don’t just distribute wealth differently - they actually generate more wealth. It’s possible for everyone in that nation to be richer, if the government uses taxation to redistribute some of that wealth.

I'm not following your example on the homebuilding company. It all seems nebulous to me. Could you help clarify?

Where is the 10% profit coming from, and how are you able to afford a home for yourself from the ten that you built? Are you using the profit off the other 9 homes to fund your own home? (i.e. the profit is the 10th home?)

Maybe the root question to all that is: What do you mean by "the amount of wealth in the world actually increased?" I don't truly understand that.

The only way you have profit is by not paying the laborers their worth who built the homes. If you have a profit margin of 10% then you're paying your workers 10% less than what they should be getting paid.

Now, taxes and wealth redistribution sounds like a huge caveat to me. You tax the profits from the home building and redistribute it. Why bother with the whole home building thing in the first place? It seems like extra steps Why not just build and give people homes and skip the the intermediary step of money?

Another question for your homebuilding example: Why do you think you deserve a house for essentially free using your "profits" while other people have to pay for the house? What makes you better than them? (This is not directed at you, but the hypothetical homebuilder. If it's reading as adversarial, I don't mean for it to be.)

Your home building scenario with profit margins is a great example of how profit totally distorts motives so that the problem you're solving isn't meeting people's needs, but instead meeting the need of making more money. In the US, we have a housing problem. We have lots of homeless. We have the technology to build people homes (even efficient, dense housing), but since it's not profitable, it doesn't get done.

For anything like that to get done in our society, it must be profitable. You can see this in action with how much of our public services are struggling.

> Maybe the root question to all that is: What do you mean by "the amount of wealth in the world actually increased?" I don't truly understand that.

Simple: a home is worth more than the wood that was used to build it, and me and the laborers are better off working than sitting on our asses, if the government allows us all to get paid for our work. The amount of wealth in the world actually increases when somebody has the impetus to make things happen.

> The only way you have profit is by not paying the laborers their worth who built the homes. If you have a profit margin of 10% then you're paying your workers 10% less than what they should be getting paid.

If I don’t get paid for running the homebuilding company, nobody is going to bother building the home, so the home doesn’t get built. If we “skip the step” of paying me for organizing things, you just have a bunch of unused inputs. My organizing effort is also labor, and if there’s a mismatch in the supply of managers and hammerers, competitive pressures will adjust how much we each get paid. The role of money here is to balance supply and demand, so the things that get done are the things that other people need to get done. With money, the needs of society at large drive planning (there are externalities that should be corrected by the government through taxation to keep this functioning smoothly). Without money, only the desires of people with guns who can force others to work for free are taken into account.

As a whole, the US has plenty of homes for everyone, but in some regions densely building new homes is mostly illegal, so not enough homes are built. These are the regions where there is a homelessness crisis. Unfortunately the government is terrible at things like deciding how many homes there should be and getting them built, so when it controls the planning process, not enough homes get built where they are needed. Better to just let the developers build as many homes as there is demand for, and tax them to pay for housing for the homeless.

> a home is worth more than the wood that was used to build it

I agree with this part, but it doesn't address why, though. The house is worth more than its material costs because of labor costs.

> The role of money here is to balance supply and demand

I don't think the role of money is to balance supply and demand, it is to facilitate exchange between items of different exchange values. It is a tool that exists outside of capitalism.

> so the things that get done are the things that other people need to get done

I respectfully disagree here. I don't know where you live, but I guarantee you there's plenty of things that people need that need to get done that doesn't get done. I argue that in a capitalist system, what is most profitable gets done. In some cases, what gets done aligns with the needs of the people, but in many cases, the needs of the people are not met. I think it should be obvious that a capitalist system cannot distribute resources effectively if you look at this pandemic.

I agree that our governments are mishandling everything, but that doesn't have to be the case. A government has the most resources to determine how many homes get built... they just don't do it, because ultimately, it's not profitable.

Look at any city budget and see where most of the money is spent: it's spent on the police budget, not on things that need to get done for the people, like building homes, or providng healthcare, etc.

Here is a simple scenario to illustrate that extra money is not created. We are at a market, and you are selling wine to me, but sell it for more than the cost it took you to make it. I'm selling books, but also want to make a sell them for more than their cost tome, so I sell it to you for more than I paid for it. If everyone does this, then you can imagine all prices rising and falling together. If the extra money we received goes back into the market for other necessities, then we didn't really make a profit. Profit is created when money is removed from the system and accumulates and is hoarded.

I'm going to be logging off for now, but I've enjoyed this discussion.

I would probably not use Robinhood, but it's fairly common for people starting out to open an account and do a modest recurring purchase of some index fund or other "boring" fund with low management fees. It takes time but it does grow.

>Say I invest $1200 over a year. How much would it "grow"?

Depends on the investment and depends on the market. Figure a few percent, which isn't a lot but save $1,000/year and it starts to add up.

Investing presumes you already have money. This may not even be feasible for the majority of Americans; according to [0], 69% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings.

Let's say that I can save $1200/year for 10 years with an interest rate of 8%... After 10 years, it would have grown by about $5k. Some CEOs make that much in a day or week off of the exploitation of their workers.

I would spend ten years, a whole decade!! And this assumes that it goes smoothly with no emergencies, no medical expenses, and wage growth keeps up with cost of living.. All these things that don't happen in real life. After all, everything that's required to live (the bare necessities) costs money, which eats away at my savings while making someone with already a lot of money even richer.

If you take reality into account, I think it's a pipedream for people of lower socioeconomic statuses to be able to climb the economic ladder into a higher class.

Again, I'm trying to illustrate how there's very little positive vertical movement for the majority of people.

[0]: https://www.gobankingrates.com/saving-money/savings-advice/a...

Yeah. So your investment has increased by 5k in the first 10 years. You only contributed $100 a month, which is doable for a lot of people, and go 5k for 'free'. In 20 years, it will have grown by 30k on top of your contributions. Again, assuming you never adjust your contributions.

Try the same calculation, but now with $500 a month.

Although 8% is optimistic, compound interest is really powerful.

It is indeed difficult to get ahead if you are paycheck to paycheck. It can be impossible if you can't even pay for your basic necessities.

But many people are not in that situation. They buy stuff they don't need. They buy new cars on credit - which is a depreciating asset with interest. They buy phones they also don't need - sometimes in multiple installments too.

Instead, try throwing anything extra you can scrape in investments. If you are aggressive about it, you can retire much earlier than you would be able to, normally.

Are you familiar with how stock markets work?