I'm not sure I can say I'm disgusted by assuming hourly workers are intelligent.
Why is it that investing is gambling only for the poor? Is the implication the poor people are less informed and less intelligent?
> do you really expect to compete with the investors paying 20k for a Bloomberg terminal, who get all the news 15 minutes before you can even hear about it?
Not if you're day trading, of course not. But letting someone who stocks sodas all day buy a couple Pepsi shares seems highly legitimate. The stock market will be more intelligent with more opinions in the pool, not less.
Stock picking is gambling for pretty much everyone, even professionals don't beat the market most of the time.
Income is somewhat correlated with intelligence, but thats not the issue I have with marketing to lower income people, since as you said there are lots of very smart people at all income levels. The problem is that lower income people have less to lose, and are less able to recover from losses, so I am more concerned with them loosing money than if a well paid professional looses their bonus or something in the market. Also lower income people are more likely to try more risky methods of getting money, and are more likely a member of a vulnerable demographic (ex. pyramid schemes have a lot of success targetting recent immigrants without much income).
I think there is a lot of value in letting someone who stocks sodas all day buy some Pepsi stock if they have some money free to play around with. I've done some day trading, it's a little fun (and a lot stressful, so no more). The problem I have is when Robinhood tries to convince that person stocking sodas that they have some special insight that will let them beat the market and make money investing. That's how you get people investing and loosing more than they can afford.
> The stock market will be more intelligent with more opinions in the pool, not less.
Not sure where this came from, but the other institution where there were a lot of opinions (democracy) and even equalized voting power does not seem to confer the same benefit.
If there is any relations between the functioning of a democracy and the size of its electorate, it would seem it's a negative one.
>I'm not sure I can say I'm disgusted by assuming hourly workers are intelligent.
They don't need to make assumptions, they run an app that tracks the trades of every single person, they know that their customers aren't making money trading stocks.
So, IQ and income are related, but I'm not sure if the causal arrow points both ways. Secondly, I think the 1) make an emergency fund 2) pay debt via snowball method then finally, 3) invest for retirement hierarchy is the most effective path to financial freedom, and given that poor people are more likely to have debt and no emergency funds, it's an okay assumption that they are investing prematurely if they haven't taken care of items 1 & 2.
IQ is fake [1], but anyway Robinhood isn't purporting to be a personal finance flowchart. Vanguard would be the opposite of Robinhood and they don't help you establish an emergency fund or pay off debt, or do any checks on if you're rich enough to invest. Robinhood's just another brokerage with a clean UI.
Why is it that investing is gambling only for the poor? Is the implication the poor people are less informed and less intelligent?
> do you really expect to compete with the investors paying 20k for a Bloomberg terminal, who get all the news 15 minutes before you can even hear about it?
Not if you're day trading, of course not. But letting someone who stocks sodas all day buy a couple Pepsi shares seems highly legitimate. The stock market will be more intelligent with more opinions in the pool, not less.