Basically, I'm dirt poor. My pay sucks and I'm practically unemployable outside of my shit-tier job. I think I want to eventually get a master's or a BA in Computer Science, but for the time being I have nothing.

From the way I see it, invoosters are the only people anyone gives a damn about and I can think of investing as a method to get some of my surplus value back in a socially acceptable way. If it wasn't obvious enough already, I am American and this country would rather collapse than see the 1% give back even a penny that they looted from the middle class. Even blue places would rather die than have more housing be built, and those lower the homelessness...I mean, the investor's value.

My first thing I want to check out is Webull but there is something about the app that feels sketchy, and I can't put my finger on it.

Okay porky, you win. If you like invoosters so much, I'll be one. Happy?

  • DeleteriousDanforth [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    If you have $100 right now and you can do all that stuff above, then you need to realize how restrictive that is. You are automatically locked out of most stocks worth holding long-term. Not all of them, but most. You’re locked out because you never, ever want to blow your entire pile of capital on one trade or a single stock. That means even though you have $100 you only want to spend less than 5% of it on a single trade. The more of your money tied up, the more you’re risking. Risk management is a huge thing with any investment. What can you buy with $5? Not much. You’re stuck with penny stocks.

    this section is wrong; almost every brokerage supports fractional shares, and you make no mention of ETFs which track the value of a diverse basket of securities while only being traded as a single instrument. you absolutely can put $100 into SPY or SOXX, though the truth is if you barely have any savings there isn't really a point to tying up your emergency funds in the hope of making an extra $8/year

    • betelgeuse [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I didn't mention a lot because I was on my lunch break and didn't have time to teach a college-level course on the matter. You can put $100 into spy but then again if you only have $100, you're taking on a lot of risk. SPY isn't diversified as we've found out over the past year. It was heavily influenced by tech which took a huge dump. As crisis in capitalism continue to mount, and the fed has to intervene more and more, then who knows what will happen to SPY? Like you said, it's not worth it for an extra $8 annually.

      Whether or not it's actually diversified depends on the ETF. Like ARK. I know you didn't say buy any ETF, just wanted to be clear.

      Plus with fractional shares, it depends on the broker whether or not you own those shares. With Webull you're probably speculating with those shares but they're not yours. So I wouldn't trust any fintech long term with fractional shares that I can't actually own.

      I didn't even get into dividends or anything either. There's a lot to learn.