Why are the rates not tracked in the quick summary so everyone can update?

Waro said:Might want to add Citibank E-Savings at 4.50% w/ no minimum
Please see my previous post.

Waro said:Might want to add Citibank E-Savings at 4.50% w/ no minimum
In addition to what SweetCash said, it doesn't really have no minimum. The account itself has no minimum, but to open it you must also open a Citibank checking account, and that one does have a minimum.

IAmStingRay said:Why didn't you add Amboy
That looks like a new product, it has no history, so there's just nothing yet to track in this thread...

IAmStingRay, if you are interested in the Amboy Direct account, start a thread on it. Make sure Amboy's rate changes are posted to that thread. 6 months from now, if Amboy's product is still competitive and your thread has the rate history for 6 months, let SweetCash know by posting here and I'm sure you'll have a much better case for tracking the account.

Everything must start somewhere, but tracking something that has zero history does not seem useful.

Do you agree ?

Anakin

anakinskywalker said:IAmStingRay, if you are interested in the Amboy Direct account, start a thread on it.

Actually, to me it seems more intuitive to have it here, given almost all the other major players are in this thread. Just my 1½ cents on the subject...

Edit: corrected typo above

Can we go back to the 1990 and get 8%?

ING was at 6% when I first joined.

BigYellowDog said:Except for the one time 4.8 promotional rate and the recent drop to 4.5, it looks like HSBC has been almost lock step with the fed funds rate. Is HSBC to increase its rate up to 4.75 or 5.00 soon?
Not according to a NYT article:

"Unlike credit card users, who freely hop from one product to the next to get a better rate, savings account holders tend to be more loyal, Mr. Newman said. Thus, he said, HSBC Direct does not feel compelled to offer the very highest yield."

mariojm said:x43b said:mariojm said:Very nice charting, thanks. Would you mind curve fitting them and then taking the derivative to see the rate of change of the rate? So we can predict the next big leader.

Sounds like someone has taken an intro calculus or statistics class. Good luck with using the derivative of the rate to actually predict the next highest rate. Rate decisions are human made and probably are event driven (Fed fund rate, competitors' rates, did they meet there deposit goals last quarter) then they are "inertia" driven (oh well we raised the rate .25% every 3 months, so based on the derivative let's do it again to follow the extrapolation).

Thanks for the excellent analysis of my comment, actually I meant it semi-humorous/cynical (I actually felt like too much interpretation would go too far). I'm sorry it was too "intro" for you, if you so desire we can also treat the banks as a column vector with the rates in a diagonal matrix and take partial derivatives of the rates. Or, we may even calculate the path integral of the individual bank's rates in vector space and use Stokes' theorem to calculate the enclosed area.

In any case, I partially agree with your comment but not entirely. I think they try to keep the rates much more consistant than they were if they were purely event driven. For instance, they rarely jump in response to fed funds rate target changes, because most of the time the change is already built into expectations. I agree that recently there have been a lot of rate changes in response to competitors. I think the HYS industry is gravitating towards more collusion, to where banks don't raise their rates because others don't, instead of trying to be a "rate leader." I think it's a natural progression towards that end because the banks can't afford to increase rates and drive each other out of business in the long term.

It wasn't "intro" because the math wasn't sophisticated enough, it is just I find people who were recently introduced to the mind blowing world of calculus seem to they can apply those principles anywhere without a solid physical basis. In regards to the not being event driven, I guess I'm going to have to play the semantics game of what is an "event". If the banks have already "priced in" the increase then I would say that is still event driven based on the fact that the Fed's previous statements and actions (events) drove them to raise the rate in anticipation.

I agree with you about the natural progression. As banks mature they tend to become less competitive. The path is clear

1) ING: rate leader-->large following and deposits-->not a rate leader
2) Virtual Bank: same
3) Emigrant Direct: same
4) HSBC: same (they even stated in a newspaper article that they no longer need to be a rate leader to maintain their deposits)

The unfortunate thing is as HYS gets older the progression is accelerating (or would you prefer I say second derivative with respect to time?) and today's rate leaders hold on for shorter and shorter periods before moving back in the pack.