Robinhood $ : Login Ⓐccount
Robinhood Login Account is a popular choice for beginner investors due to its ease of use and lack of fees. In order to start investing with Robinhood, you must first create an account and start...
Last updated
Robinhood Login Account is a popular choice for beginner investors due to its ease of use and lack of fees. In order to start investing with Robinhood, you must first create an account and start...
Last updated
Mutual funds are one of the most popular ways for individual investors to take part in the market, but in the case of Robinhood, investors don’t have that choice. It’s another area where traditional online brokers fare well against this disruptor because they’ll offer thousands of no-transaction-fee funds and thousands of other funds, too.
Robinhood Login Account is not a full-service brokerage, so don’t expect the same level of account types that you’d find at rivals. Only recently has the broker expanded from its lone offering — the individual taxable account — to IRAs. So no joint accounts, no 529 savings accounts, etc. That’s a real knock for investors who would like to expand their relationship but must use another broker for their other account types.
You could pick almost any other broker and find more account types than you’ll find here.
Potential customers should be aware of some of Robinhood’s legal missteps in the recent past.
So here’s one of the secrets to how Robinhood can offer you free trades – the company is selling your order flow to high-frequency traders so that they can anticipate the market and get better prices on their trades from people like you. That is, Robinhood’s practice allows these traders to front-run you and other clients to squeeze out pennies or fractions of pennies on each trade, buying from you at a lower price and selling to you at a higher price.
The broker’s subterfuge around this issue from 2015 to 2018 led the Securities and Exchange Commission to fine it $65 million in late 2020, with the broker not admitting any wrongdoing and now saying that it has cleaned up its act.
For long-term investors, a few pennies on a trade is not a substantial issue. For those playing the short-term trading game, it does make it more difficult to scalp extra dollars off each trade.
It’s worth noting that other major brokers also rely on selling order flow, even more so now that the industry has moved to a “no commissions” model of trading. So it’s not as if Robinhood is the only broker doing this (legal) practice, though the SEC is reconsidering whether it will allow the practice to continue.
In addition, Robinhood was hit with a $70 million penalty in 2021 related to misleading customers, approving risky trades for some traders and a series of service outages.
Robinhood advertises free cryptocurrency trades, and that’s true to the extent that you don’t pay out-of-pocket commissions for your trades. In contrast, other crypto brokers will hit you for fees that typically range from 0.1 to 0.5 percent of your trade value. But the devil is in the details.
Unlike many other brokers or crypto exchanges, Robinhood builds in a spread markup on its crypto pricing. Compared to other exchanges – which show you the actual bid and ask prices on an exchange – Robinhood effectively shows you a wider bid-ask spread. So the pricing you’ll get at Robinhood is less attractive than you’ll find at other brokers who don’t do this. How much worse is it? It’s not clear, because Robinhood doesn’t disclose the markup. But when other rivals offer a commission of just 0.1 percent, that’s going to be hard to beat.
This subterfuge allows Robinhood to still claim that it offers free trades, though in a real sense clients are paying for trades via that higher markup. Sometimes free may be more expensive.
Robinhood has done a fair bit to clean up its (deserved) reputation for poor customer service. Before, it was next to impossible to get someone on the phone to discuss your account. Now, the company has instituted a 24/7 system that calls you back with a human response. The good news is that it might ultimately be more efficient, even if it takes you more time to receive your answer. It’s also opened 24/7 chat to help get you the answers you need.
Of course, you still have the options that existed before – the broker’s help page – if you have one of the many questions that are easily answered. Move only a bit farther afield, however, and you may be hard-pressed to find a solution without contacting customer service.
In an age where Fidelity or Schwab can answer your questions via phone or chat in seconds while providing a helpful and friendly response, Robinhood is still behind but has moved up.
