Public: Invest & Trade

I’m transferring out of this nightmare episode with this company.. EASY TO GET YOUR MONEY IN.. HARD TO GET YOUR MONEY OUT.. The red flags started 14 days after becoming a customer, I was making money via selling covered calls, and none of the money after the T1 settlement was showing up. In order to communicate with them, you first have to get past their terrible AI and in order to get a human to respond to your problems they need a full trading day.. So after receiving a response from a human, I was able to see funds available for withdrawal.. So the next day it said I had over $4000 available for withdrawal, so I put in to remove $3300.. The app made it seem like everything was great, and then near the end of the trading day I get an email that says the transaction was rejected.. So I do another one for $2800 near the end of the trading day and that one goes thru.. When requesting your money they want you to explain why you need it which is very annoying.. Over the next 30 days, I kept getting rejections for withdrawing money, so to make things easier I just paid them a hefty fee for instant cash.. This is their entire ploy, they want you to pay them to get your money… Let’s talk Margin Buffer: regardless of what you see, your entire buffer will vanish and you’ll be in a margin call that you don’t know of and they will just sell your stock.. This was the final straw with these people. I had a margin buffer of over $55,000 which basically meant that if the stock declined $55000 then that would be triggered, however during the trading day, the stock declined about $25000 early and recovered to close green.. However my entire margin buffer vanished.. I didn’t notice this until I looked at the available cash to buy stock which was over $13,000, and seen it go to zero up logging back in the next trading day.. I had no plans to buy stock but during the next trading day while the stock was roaring green, They sold my shares because I was in a margin call that I didn’t know about from the previous day.. Keep in mind that the amount of money in the stock account was more than the amount borrowed significantly.. So I then started to watch the margin buffer move up and down with the portfolio value while still in the margin call.. The margin buffer should have been fixed and get triggered once the stock declined and trigger the margin call which never happened.. The UX is not good: The only valuable aspect is the rebates on the Options contracts sold and repurchased.. THATS THE CARROT that suckers investors in.. The execution of contracts is very poor and slow.. They distract you with some fancy screen with promos showing how close you are to execution and sometimes the screen gets stuck.. Other times I tried to sell a contract 14 days out and I set the price at the BID which should have executed automatically and it just sat there in the queue.. So I went over to Robinhood and executed the same exact trade and it filled immediately.. That was the straw that broke the camels back.. It gets worse:: So I go to Robinhood and initiate a portfolio transfer, I get a message from Public that they received it and everything is in order.. literally, the next morning at 5:30am I get a message from Robinhood saying that PUBLIC rejected the transfer.. And I get ZERO NOTIFICATION FROM PUBLIC.. Now keep in mind that once they confirmed that a transfer in being processed you cannot buy or sell or make any transactions on the account.. So the next trading day starts, I’m log in and I can’t begin to sell my stock because they never unfroze my ability to trade.. I spend the entire morning messaging them and only getting their useless AI and finally someone says we rejected your transfer request that normally takes between 5-7 trading days because I had a single short dated option that EXPIRED THAT DAY.. So while I can’t trade or make any moved because PUBLIC FROZE my account, the market opens and it’s a sell off.. I’m hemorrhaging money and by time a human comes along the losses are around $40,000… So I get rid of that one contract due to expire, and re submitted my transfer request to Robinhood.. I hope this is the end of this nightmare.. DO NOT START A RELATIONSHIP WITH THESE PEOPLE…

Public is a very user friendly app and it has a lot of products. I got it to buy stocks and crypto with. So far it has been a delight to use.

Transaction fees, charging people left and right if I could find the stock on another buyer, I will buy it from them and not public