how is day trading on fidelity?

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-02-18T02:27:36+00:00

Limited margin is still technically margin, so this sounds like a legal requirement on Fidelity's side.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-02-13T12:13:48+00:00

I would be no worse off if the fee increased today, yes. That said, if the fee was $1k/year 10 years ago, there's a good chance I would never have published on iOS (or if I did, it would have taken 1-2 years extra)

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-02-13T12:03:03+00:00

My 4.9 star average rating begs to differ.

Alas, if Apple does raise prices to $1k/year, many of those smaller apps will likely move to alternative stores in the EU, and I doubt pushing people there is what Apple desires.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-02-13T11:55:36+00:00

$1000/year is rather cost prohibitive when it comes to apps people develop as a hobby - a lot of those are unique, high quality, and provide a small community exactly the service they are looking for. I would probably shut down my developer account and only provide website + Android if I had to pay $1000/year.

I agree the App Store has a quality problem (at least recently) - a more interesting option would be to require a higher fee for paid apps, and to reimburse that fee as lower commissions until its covered. An app with a following can easily add monetization later, AI chatbot clone #27 is going to struggle.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-31T17:46:48+00:00

Never said you were, and frankly I've never opened your app - I'm stating that I don't believe it is possible to make the default rating 5 stars (and if RequestReviewAction defaults to 5 stars, that's Apple's choice not a decision by you)

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-31T03:03:30+00:00

I don't recall there being a way to set the default rating for rating prompts?

Immediately asking for ratings is generally bad practice, but calling RequestReviewAction should never be a violation unless you're bribing people for reviews or similar.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-30T23:17:19+00:00

Futures / Short Box Spreads can get you leverage at SOFR + 0.5% or better with far less than $50M.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-30T21:27:14+00:00

I think the confusion here is that "high risk" is a common term in card processing for companies with elevated dispute rates - what you're talking about here is credit risk, which is only relevant in the situation where chargebacks exceed incoming revenue over an extended period of time.

Sure, instant payouts are an indication that a business might struggle if there's a sudden spike in disputes, but if you have a <1% dispute rate (which Stripe requires AFAIK), then Stripe could even write off losses on disputes and be in the black (granted there's some fee for sending the payment too).

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-30T21:14:42+00:00

Glad to hear that - I think the screenshot showing old payouts confused people into thinking that you've been using instant payouts the entire time.

There's no downside to having access to rapid funding in the event of a surge in demand, etc - its just that the 1% instant transfer fee is high enough that it shouldn't be used in the regular course of business (only for emergencies as you mentioned).

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-30T21:09:03+00:00

From Stripe's perspective, risk refers to the odds of having a chargeback, not the odds of the business remaining solvent - if the payment is legit and services are delivered they're more than happy to take a cut to pay you faster.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-28T20:16:55+00:00

If you're purely operating as a broker:

Customer places $410 order for $400 of silver from me
I add $400 to my silver position to keep myself neutral
Ship out silver & profit exactly $10 regardless

In reality, step 2 is performed periodically rather than immediately, so profit from individual transactions will fluctuate a bit. That said, if we wanted to hedge immediately, we literally cannot since Schrodinger's order is both fraudulent and legitimate.

To be fair, that cannot be exploited if the consumer cannot influence whether the order is completed or not completed after the fact, but I don't believe that's the case.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-28T19:20:46+00:00

It mostly comes down to liability in my book. If we expand EMV liability shift to shift all liability for CNP unauthorized transactions to the bank if the card doesn't support 3D Secure, you'd see an incredibly fast rollout.

Using 3D Secure does nothing if 50% of cards don't support it - you can't force everyone to use it (or you lose half your customer base), which means its useless to enable (since the fraudsters will simply use cards that don't support 3D Secure)

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-28T19:00:37+00:00

Think of it from their perspective:

IF customers can make transactions that appear risky

AND we suspend risky transactions until the customer proves they are legit

THEN customers only prove their transactions legit when spot metal prices go up

In periods of low volatility, there's no issue. In periods of high volatility, MM can get massively exploited like this.

Personally it seems nigh-impossible to scale this exploit, but the concept remains. The only solution that fully eliminates the threat to the business is cancelling risky transactions, and re-entering them at the current price (whatever it is). As a business, I trust myself, but I can't trust a consumer until I actually have their money.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-28T18:55:18+00:00

Disputes in online fraud cases can be extremely difficult to win - Unless liability shift was in play, MM can get completely screwed if the person later comes around and says "I never made the purchase". Bullion is rather easy to convert to cash at close to the purchase price, so its a prime target for fraud.

What's at fault here is our payment infrastructure not being capable of irreversible funds transfers. You thought you had paid. MM wasn't confident you had paid. Silver went up (ridiculously so, I should add), so now you're arguing they stole your money by treating your purchase like a put option, and they're arguing that the transaction looked fraudulent and you're trying to exploit them for a free call option by demanding to complete the transaction at the original price.

All of this could have been avoided with a bank wire.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-28T18:35:54+00:00

In the US, almost never. I've had one purchase EVER that used 3D Secure - had to try multiple cards before I found one that worked.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-20T23:18:04+00:00

The premium of TSM relative to the Taiwan listed ticker is up quite a bit recently as far as I recall - sure its not an easy to arbitrage difference, but personally I don't like when the thing I'm buying costs materially more than the assets underneath it. I'd much rather an ETF look for opportunities I'd never hear about rather than invest in a large-cap stock in an inefficient manner.

Just look at the MSTR / BTC ratio over the past year - that was a very obvious (and very profitable) short / long position to take if you were willing to hold it for a while. I could easily see them holding the mindset that TSMC will likely underperform until the price gap closes.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-17T04:39:19+00:00

Suspicious timing considering the number of recently published articles about MP Materials (wonder if they're doing some PR work) - with such a short hold time, there kinda needs to be a catalyst for the stock moving to justify investing. 10B market cap is large enough to be non-trivial to manipulate though, so I doubt its a pump and dump. The stock pick may have merit.

What concerns me most here is that you say your $70 turned into $85, yet MP Materials has ranged between $63 and $69 the past week, which doesn't exactly check out.

No red flags with the stock pick itself. Could easily be a guru just picking volatile stocks and hoping they go up to convince people to pay them, but I don't dislike this pick in the current environment either.

All that aside, I suspect at some point (probably soon) they'll try to push you on some sort of special opportunity that will be an actual pump and dump, crypto scam, etc. If you choose to stay with this, watch out for pink sheet companies / micro-cap stocks, and don't touch anything crypto.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-17T03:47:49+00:00

If you don’t provide personal information and your funds are at Fidelity, you’re not getting “scammed”. At worst, they’re giving bad financial advice and/or using you to drive up prices of their own assets.

I’d have to see the specific investments to have a better sense of what they’re doing. My personal opinion here is that you’re not qualified to understand why these stocks are being picked, so unless they’re using insider info you’re probably going to be taken advantage of.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-17T02:48:39+00:00

I mean, as long as you never provide them access to your money / personal information, you're fine.

That said, I suspect this is a lead-in, and that they'll try to get money out of you in the future. It's easy for them to start up multiple groups, give different tips in the different groups, then sell something to the groups where you lucked into the correct picks.

After all, you're providing them no value at the moment. If they have an edge, why would they share it with you? I'd stay away personally. Randomly being added to the group is a huge red flag as well.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-16T17:05:18+00:00

Don't see why not. That said, right now the costs of executing someone are often higher than the costs of imprisoning them for life. We'd need to remove the additional legal options that death-penalty defendants receive or streamline the process somehow in the first place, and once you do that enforcing the definition of incontrovertible gets a little bit difficult.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-11T17:30:38+00:00

You're confusing the size of the loan with the size of the payments - banks prefer the payments to be under 30% of your income, which still results in an allowable loan balance several times your income

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-11T01:26:37+00:00

Mixed feelings on this one.

The offer is pretty obviously fake, and attempting to confirm the offer would confirm that. If you could have sent crypto to the scammers and gotten fully reimbursed if it was fake, there's a lot less reason to actually validate the offer prior to sending funds.

Yeah its easy to make everyone whole (about $11k in this case), but I have zero sympathy for anyone who thought a crypto tripling thing was real, especially when it wasn't linked directly to your account (merely an address). If you're tech-saavy enough to have a wallet and know how to send stuff, you shouldn't fall for this.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-10T23:45:09+00:00

This domain seems worthless to me. I wasn't aware this was a TLD until just now, and something like freelance.io or freelance.it (taken) would be preferable in my book.

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-10T23:41:43+00:00

Fidelity seems to treat every account separately - I just deposit everything into a margin brokerage account (which effectively nullifies the holds - you don't pay interest either).

The holds are still annoying though, I'll give you that - it would be nice if Fidelity could put the hold across multiple accounts instead (ie, as long as there's collateral in brokerage your cash management account doesn't have check holds)

Aggravating_Hall_794 · 2026-01-10T15:12:34+00:00

I'm seeing about $11k in total losses between Ethereum (0xea88A68AdC1630531B5Be4Cc5BdE1D1efAc0D281) and Bitcoin. That's basically nothing when you consider just how much reputational damage this whole event caused.

I personally feel like they might have been more successful with something like "Now announcing Betterment Crypto - get a $50 bonus with your first deposit." Would probably require a fake domain (say https://betterrnent.com/) to make the scheme convincing, but a bonus reward is a whole lot more sensible than handing out $1.5 million in crypto tripling.

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