I’m actually surprised your son-in-law is only investing $100 per trade. At the $2 in commissions, that is a pretty steep fee on top of batch trading timing. I think he’d be much better served investing at least $200, if not more. Anytime you can minimize your fees, you put yourself in better situation. Counter to that point is that investing something is better than nothing, even if it is at a higher cost.

Going back to Jason’s comment, it really is about market timing. Jason wants the control to put his money to work at the exact moment he hits buy, as opposed to waiting a couple of days and losing control over whether the price goes up or down. We’re arguing about semantics at that point, considering you’re looking at apples to oranges on transaction types and investment styles. If ‘cost’ can be construed as paying market price at the time an order goes through, you’re best not investing at all, because everything will have a ‘cost’.

My main point with the recommendation of Loyal3 is that it is a great means to add money at no-cost into some really solid dividend payers, especially for beginner investors with little capital available to invest.

I’m glad you’ve gotten a chance to check out Robinhood. As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not interested in them until they have a web-based interface. I do not have an iOS phone or other device, and will not get one just to check them out. If they want to send me one… well that’s another story! Be sure to let me know how it goes working on their platform.

Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts!

I have to admit that was a great debate between you and Jason. Each of you have great points! Both of you presented each side of things quite well…

I will throw this in, what about ShareBuilder and their “auto-invest” service? If you are a Costco member, they will invest your chosen dollar amount each Tuesday for $2.00. My future son-in-law is doing this now and investing $100 per auto-investment day making the fee an additional 2% on the cost. He is buying PM and JNJ this way.

From Jason’s side, this is still not market timing and it may not buy the best price of the day, but I think if you have 40 years to invest ahead of you, this is not such a bad deal.

I have also spoken with him about Loyal3, and he may purchase some KO from them. Not sure yet.

I finally got my Robinhood invite and have played around with it just a bit. Seems to be a good simple platform although I am not sure how they will do in the longer term. I understand they are rolling out Android sometime soon. I hold 1 share of BRK.B with them just so I have something invested. I want to see how these guys will grow and what else they will come up with over the next year.

At any rate, I am glad that you two went back and forth. Great for your readers!

Ray

As for Robinhood, they offer quite a bit, but until they have a web-based platform I have absolutely no interest in them. Additionally, their sources of revenue generation are so narrow, I’m not sure how they’ll be able to survive long-term. With Loyal3, they focus on generating revenue from businesses, not from their retail customers. Different operating mentality completely.

Great to hear thoughts from a range of people, so thank you for reading and sharing yours.

I agree with some of the stuff DM said, but I don’t see those as reasons to not use Loyal3 as you can schedule on a daily resolution within the scope of a month. A more interesting service, albeit new, is robinhood.com. They let you trade relatively instantaneously presumably on the major brokerage fullfilment-comission routes with no commision. The biggest drawback is their service is iPad/iPhone only.

Good to see you’re using them effectively for yourself. I’ll be looking into them more along the lines of puts, but we shall see what happens.

I typically sell calls against my positions and out of the money puts for stocks that I wouldn’t mind owning more of at lower prices. In each case I am just reducing cost basis

Cheers!

I’m glad you’re a faithful reader and enjoy the Loyal3 portfolio updates. Feel free to continue weighing in on your own portfolio.

Keep on keepin’ on!
PATMURRY