I am experimenting with an interesting trading style that has caught the attention of my friend. He wants to send me money to invest. Right now I only have a personal trading account with Robinhood and I am not connected with professional investing in any way.
I would like help evaluating what legal requirements would be involved with any and all of these ideas, as well as help coming up with better/alternative ideas and the legal requirements that go with those. I realize in the end I would be wise to get professional legal advice, but I can't justify that expense until I feel there is something to this idea and I am very serious about moving forward with it. My legal concerns are at least the following: Would I need to register/setup a business? Who is supposed to pay what taxes? Would I be breaching my Robinhood contract by investing someone else's money in my account? Would I be breaching a Robinhood contract if I invest someone else's money in their account? Would any of this require me to register myself as some kind of investment adviser or anything else in connection with investing? We both live in the United States.
I'm not worried about how it will affect our friendship because I would not move forward unless we came up with a contract that we are both sure will not incentivize either of us to screw over the other one. Also, he is a pretty level headed guy and seems to be really genuine in feeling he could lose all the money he gives me.
Anyway, at first I was thinking it could be really helpful to have extra money in the account. Somehow I was thinking that more money means it will grow faster. But I just did the math, and that is not really the way numbers work. I mean, yes the total account value will grow faster, but if in the end we each get our percentage back, the account growing faster doesn't mean either of us individually are making money any faster than if we had separate accounts. So unless some benefit to me is built into the contract only he is benefiting from this arrangement, since I am doing all the investing work for him.
Because of that, he is willing to let me keep some percentage of his gains, possibly 25%. The other potential benefit to both of us, is that after we have over a very specific amount of money in the account, we would in theory boost our earnings by 66.66%
In case it makes any difference, I am not using any leverage, and I don't intend to. I am technically using margin though, because it is a Robinhood instant account, which is their standard account type for a new account.
Another possibility is we could both keep separate accounts and I could manage both of them. But because of the nature of the opportunities I am capitalizing on, this would increase my workload by 66%, and his account could only ever grow by 66% of what mine could. It would also introduce some emotionally uncomfortable detachment between our account values. They would not rise and fall together, because I would not be able to buy and sell the same stocks in his account since that is just not possible with this strategy.
Possibly my main concern is this makes the whole thing potentially much more messy. One of the main appeals of the stock market for me is I don't need to register a business to trade in it. This keeps things relatively simple for me, which is important. If it takes up too much of my time and energy, it may not be worth it for me anymore. Some of the things that stress me out the most is filling out legal documents and considering the legal ramifications of things, so I don't want that to be a long term drain on me.
Also, lets say this works out really well, and 2 or 3 other people end up wanting me to trade with their money too, would that change the legal implications? I imagine at some point it would have too, I mean if I were managing the money of 100 people, obviously there would be additional implications and requirements for that right?
Submitted May 07, 2018 at 12:08PM by still_dreaming_1 https://ift.tt/2FRrNfb
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