The clue is in the meaning of the words. You are choosing to have your own personal definition of that phrase, but I don’t know why. It’s not helpful to anyone.
No, I personally dislike them since they banned me from their forums. But the facts are quite clear.
Anyway, to sum up, the only reason you like Robinhood is they offer instant free trades. It isn’t obvious why you like that feature, or what you’d do with it, or why existing UK platforms offering that feature aren’t suitable. Thank you for your valuable insight!
It isn’t a “feature”: it is literally what any reputable UK broker offers, only Robinhood offer it for free. The Freetrade service is not free. You cannot quote and deal a trade anytime during trading hours for free. It’s a bulk, one-off service where you don’t know the price.
Can you seriously not differentiate that? Do you not see the value in knowing the price of an equity before you buy it? The mind boggles.
“No, I personally dislike them since they banned me from their forums.”
I think what @Sendu is saying and you keep skipping over is that Robinhood isn’t the only company offering free instant trades in the UK as Trading 212 do.
So the question is, outside of that what are you looking forward most to?
Sure if I was day trading or trying to make marginal gains, but I’m not a stockbroker and the shares I pick up are likely to be with me for a while - so the change from when I put my order in at 1:30/2:00 to when it is executed at 4:00 is not really my biggest concern.
And I think that is the market Freetrade (and from what I understand, to an extent, Robinhood) is all about.
It is about bringing down the usually quite high barrier for entry into the stockmarket world for the layman. Making it easy to invest and become acquainted to the market before venturing further afield.
Robinhood offer US stocks only, where trades cost very little compared to execution in the UK/EU (this is because the US markets are much more developed).
They make money selling customer trades to the highest bidder rather than getting the best price per share for the customer. This means the customer pays a little extra per share in the form of a hidden spread which goes to RH. Commission free, yes, but this spread at certain levels costs way more than the $10 charged by other US brokers (this is payment for order flow).
RH is a company that sold out its customers out to hedge funds (despite its name meaning the opposite) and so could be considered unethical. Journalists had been investigating the company and found out this secret.
Fintech can be a force for good, Monzo, Freetrade and Emma are good UK examples of this:
I’ll be amazed if they are allowed to trade here anytime soon after their recent kerfuffle. At the very least the FCA will want to ensure they have the right controls in place before they are allowed to trade.
phildawson
(Sorry, I will have to escalate this.)
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The queue list is shooting up fast now. Only just registered and checked ~5 minutes later to find another 1,500 had. About five people a second currently.
Weird just checked back and only £10k so guess it was people just spotting the article today and hasn’t triggered a stampede as I thought.
Maybe not but terrifying competition nonetheless. I believe they had generated more pre-signups this year than Freetrade have accrued in total users so far since they launched 2 years ago.
A good portion of my friends were only using Freetrade until Robinhood arrived.
Good news for the FreeTrade investors
as Robinhood could have wiped them out.