RobinHood

Founded in 2013, Robinhood’s claim to fame is that they do not charge commissions for stock, options, or cryptocurrency trading. Due to industry-wide changes, however, they’re no longer the only free game in town. The firm’s target customer base is young people new to investing, who are drawn to the app by advertising that leans heavily on words such as “free” and “democratization.” By and large, this tactic has succeeded, drawing in 10 million accounts held by an unknown number of customers. But what happens to them when they outgrow Robinhood’s meager research capabilities or get frustrated by outages during market surges?

The brokerage, with it’s easy to use the website and mobile trading app, appeals to the do-it-yourself investor. Robinhood is geared mainly towards millennial investors who want a smartphone-based trading platform without any bells and whistles. It has been a smartphone-first brokerage, with Android and iPhone apps as the primary methods to log into your account and place trades.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Robinhood’s low fees and zero balance requirement to open an account are attractive for new investors.
• Customers must pay at least $5 per month for Robinhood Gold in order to trade on margin, view market depth data, and access research, such as Morningstar reports on high-volume stocks. Robinhood customers can try the Gold service out for 30 days for free.
• Robinhood does not publish their trading statistics the way all other brokers do, so it’s hard to compare their payment for order flow statistics to anyone else. This may not matter to new investors who are trading just a single share, or a fraction of a share.