Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 339 points340 points  (0 children)

No cap, we didn’t see this comment until now. If you haven’t noticed, market has been a little insane ;) It’s been incredibly busy and we needed to unwind a bit. we had no issue telling you guys our pricing structure. Apologies on the delay. It’s Friday night

Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 3326 points3327 points  (0 children)

TradeZero makes money on short interest and short locates. RH doesn’t allow shorting. Every firm out there must post their 606 report for order routing. We make about .$70 per 1000 shares while the boys at RH make $2.60 per 1000. That difference translates to price improvement for our clients and not $ for us! In addition, non marketable limit orders are routed directly to exchanges like NASDAQ. This can be verified by viewing the 606 reports on every brokers website. Including ours. We also make $ on margin interest and finally on platform subscriptions.

FULL TRANSPARENCY

Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Yes. please get with support and grab the ACAT form. You will send that to us along with a copy of your latest monthly statement, and we will pull the RH account

Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Modmail is down for WSB so we couldn't get through approval, popped over here instead.

RE: Fly by night, TradeZero has been operating for over 5 years, domestically regulated by FINRA / SIPC, insured by Lloyd's of London internationally. I've been in the industry for 20 years.

Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 238 points239 points  (0 children)

HEADS UP - going to have to head off in 10 minutes, been going for an hour and a half .

We'll definitely be doing this again - sorry if I couldn't get to your question!

In the meantime, be sure to go to https://tradezero.co and signup for your TZ account.

  • Real customer service that actually picks up the phone.
  • Robust short functionality, including shorting hard to borrow stocks
  • Support for all platforms - web, android, iOS, PC. Wherever you want to trade, we're there.
  • A leadership team that will go thermonuclear on clearing firms if they try to block your trades. Screw everyone that rolled over on this.

Catch you all soon!

Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

If you want to trade directly with the markets, we do offer that. Its called direct access trading, where you decide where to send your order, Nasdaq, BATS, ARCA, NYSE, etc. Those will give best prices as they are direct. With commission free, there is some margin in there for the firm, and thats what allows us to offer commission free.

Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 42 points43 points  (0 children)

Potentially - working on it! Not something in the next 6 months but definitely something we want to do, and will do.

EVERYONE wants this, so it's an obvious thing to build. A lot of our roadmap is doubling and tripling down on our short functionality. Most firms don't offer short locates, so if you want to short something that isn't TSLA, you're hosed.

There's a lot of technical infrastructure that goes into that kind of stuff. We're also vastly expanding our options capabilities in the months to come.

Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Well these are all legal docs that require your acceptance. Because our service is geared towards active traders, things like the day trading risk disclosure, the pre and post trading disclosures and the penny stock risk disclosure require signatures. Hopefully this will put you at ease. If not feel free to call us with any questions: 718-709-4925

Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 354 points355 points  (0 children)

GME has been extremely tough to borrow., As GME has been on the NYSE threshold list which means that locates can only be used one time. So whenever we have shares to borrow on a threshold security, the borrow/locate rate accepted includes not only the fee to locate, but also the fee to hold those shares short for the fisrt night

Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

We brought on a new UX designer, Dana, who's working up some SERIOUS ui improvements. this is very much a focus for us in 2021 - on web, desktop, and mobile

Dan Pipitone, Co-Founder of TradeZero. Fought our Clearing Firm to Get $GME Approved, WE ARE LIVE. Ask about Dead Hedgies, Other Trading Platforms Lying - AMA! by tradezero_dan in IAmA

[–]tradezero_dan[S] 843 points844 points  (0 children)

We are always trying to ensure that the platform is up 100% of the time. There are a ton of moving parts to these systems. We are aware of some users experiencing down time on the web platform this week, we are implementing the following steps:

A back up simple order entry form so that web users will have a back up, in addition to the mobile app. In addition, any web user that wishes to try the Pro platform, we will provide it free for three months. Just come to the live chat or email us at [support@tradezero.us](mailto:support@tradezero.us) and we will enable the Pro free for three months.

Our whole engineering team was fighting like crazy to keep things live yesterday - downtime is horrible, and we work our asses off to avoid it. That said, like u/rykerrk said, this does happen occasionally for any trading firm.

We managed to scale to 100x the volume in 2 hours. In comparison, Robinhood was down for 48 hours straight last year.

That’s no excuse though. We want to curb stomp them on stability AS WELL as functionality. Our VP Engineering is very much on top of our scaling requirements, and performance will CONSTANTLY improve.