Robinhood - Online Investing
I’m sure many of you more serious and long-term investors will have a million reasons to not use Robinhood (if you join Robinhood you also get free stock, for me, I let free stock grow a little, and then I sold it off, and reinvested it) or any similar trading site, but I wanted to get my feet wet. I have a nice 401K managed by the place I work, but I wanted to try a little on my own. I started off with $50 and said, if I lose it, I lose it. And the first few weeks, I lost most of it. I moved it around, researched some stocks I liked and I made adjustments at the time of this writing it is at $128, so that isn’t too bad.
My current problem is that I don’t know what to do next. I’m not sure if I want to put in more and move it around to invest in more income companies that have been doing well for me or invest in more cryptocurrency, which I’m also doing in Robinhood, I know I should be using Coinbase for that and I likely will move some money over to Coinbase, but right now. I’m pleased with my results.
Joining Robinhood for the first time was very quick and easy. I linked up my bank account and deposited my first $25 (I started with $25 and then two weeks later invested another $25) in no time and I was up and running. I had a list of stocks that I wanted to look at and I picked those first.
Robinhood Markets, Inc.
Robinhood Markets, Inc. is an American financial services company headquartered in Menlo Park, California, known for pioneering commission-free trades of stocks and exchange-traded funds via a mobile app introduced in March 2015. Robinhood is a FINRA-regulated broker-dealer, registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and is a member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. The company’s revenue comes from three main sources: interest earned on customers’ cash balances, selling order information to high-frequency traders (a practice for which the SEC opened an investigation into the company in September 2020), and margin lending. As of 2021, Robinhood has 31 million users. (source)
In January 2021, a short squeeze of the stock of the American video game retailer GameStop (NYSE: GME) and other securities took place, causing major financial consequences for certain hedge funds and large losses for short sellers. This was mostly driven by users of r/wallstreetbets. Robinhood restricted trading in these stocks in order to meet collateral requirements at their clearinghouse, the National Securities Clearing Corporation. This caused them to lose users and got a bad rap for it.
I however stuck with them, made a little money off of GameStop, and sold and moved on.
