(Disclaimer, this article does not concern military personal finance at all, but since a large focus of Saverocity is manufacturing spend, I thought I’d share).
Over at my other website, The Military Frequent Flyer, we received an email from a longtime reader, Harry Campbell, author of the blog yourpfpro, who wrote to us concerning an interesting website for manufacturing spend. Here is his article concerning the subject. It concerns an online brokerage website called Loyal3, where the main draw is the ability to trade stocks for free, with a few caveats. His article covers the the pros and cons of the website nicely.
The positives involve free trades, buying fractional shares, and funding it with a credit card; the main con is that the trades are not real time, but happen sometime over a 1-2 day period, which means you can’t really time the . However, the main excitement about this website involves the ability to fund it with a credit card!
Loyal3 now gives you the ability to buy up to 53 stocks, mostly large-cap companies like Amazon, Walmart, and McDonald’s. You can, “fund up to $2,500 per stock using a credit card and there appears to be no monthly limit(other than the 53 stocks x $2,500)”, so that equals $132,500 of potential credit card spend. And there doesn’t seem to be a time limit on holding the stocks, so you could potentially buy the stock, hold it a day or two, however long it takes the purchase to happen, then immediately sell it.
If you’re wondering how they can make money while executing free trades, so was I. It seems there well venture-funded, they have some “agreements” with the companies in which they trade, and instead of real-time trading, and they use batch trading.
I gave up trading individual stocks a couple years ago, and now just utilize Betterment for all my stock needs, and also I have completed a massive amount of signup bonus spend this year already, and am not in the market for new credit cards for a while. So I don’t think I will be taking advantage of this website for now. However I’d love to hear what Matt or PFDigest or Chasing the Points thinks about the prospects of generating potentially huge amounts of spend.
You’re going to have a bad time if you think it’s possible to day trade with a 3% spread.
Forgive my igorance, but where are you getting the 3% spread number?
I signed up for loyal3 and drip $50 a month into Apple and Berkshire Hathaway through it. In my opinion it is a great product for dollar cost averaging into a position over time, but it would be insanity to try to use it to manufacture large spend and trade out of it again. That is hard enough anyway, but as you noted with the batch processing it becomes even harder.
Matt, I agree, I think this is the only way to not lose money on this proposition.
<–What Matt said.
Bad Time? Hard to Do? Come one guys !! Dont you read twitter?? You can trade from the beach. Its easy. You gonna let a little 3% spread stop you from living life in the fast lane 😉
Forgive my igorance, but where are you getting the 3% spread number?
Thanks for the shout out. It’s easy to dismiss Loyal3 but there aren’t a whole lot of options out there right now. I don’t have time to hunt down VR’s at random gas stations 🙂
I’m working on a follow up article but basically I did a little test run. Studies have shown that you can eliminate a lot of the diversification risk with 10-18 stocks (there’s some debate over this) so I bought $10 worth of the 10 lowest beta(volatility measure) stocks and cashed them out after a couple days(I could have done it sooner but didn’t want to set off any red flags). The market had a HORRIBLE week and I lost 2% when I sold.
Now let’s say that spend was the difference between me being able to apply for a second Citi AA Executive Card at 100,000 points. Would it be worth it for you to take a 2% loss on $10,000 in spend to get 100,000 points?
Obviously it’s risky but depending on your situation, I think Loyal3 could be used as short or long term.strategy.
No offence Harry, but that is the some of the worst advice I have heard in a good while.
Interesting concept, but the opaque “batch trading” is esp. concerning as some of the stocks they offer are pretty high-beta. Matt (or anyone else used it who’s used it) willing to let us know their execution price vs. the stock’s trading range that day?
Harry, I agree. With the travel/time commitment it takes to MS $10K, I would rather spend a couple of days days holding the same amount in a low beta stock like HSY or BRK-B, knowing there would be potential for a small loss. Realistically you might lose a few percentage points above the cost to MS the $10K using traditional means, or could even possibly make a small gain. Just make sure not to trade during earnings or preannounce season.
This is on FT as well as what I’m about to share: I did 25k worth for two months and was shut down. See FT post for all the details.
I don’t understand what all the big fuss is about. I bought 12k of stock and currently am at a $100 realized profit, and the profit will be higher when I sell the 2 stocks I’m still holding.
If I was buying VR, for that privilege I’d be spending $95, with the additional costs of gas and time spent searching for vr. Instead I’m at least $200 ahead (some of it unrealized), and spent much less time trying to ms. If you’re buying big, low volalitility, not overpriced stocks, what’s there to be so afraid of?
Why are all you bloggers such wusses?
FYI, I just wrote an updated article on my experience using Loyal3 to MS $8,000 now that they lowered their cc purchase limit: http://yourpfpro.com/racking-miles-points-loyal3/