Monthly Article-How Robinhood turned from Investing to Gambling

Robinhood has absolutely shocked the investment industry by not only allowing a platform of easy to use investing, but also by providing trades which have no attached fees or contingencies. Robinhood is best known for producing an accesible and easy to use platform which is mainly used by first time investors between to ages of 18-24. This is important because there are virtually no platforms which have such a high density of lung users, especially first time investors. These inexperienced and youthful investors can oftentimes be slayed by the way the Robinhood platform is designed and curated. Robinhood puts stock into “bundles” which consist of areas like Technology, Agriculture, and Top Movers. The top movers column of stock show the stock making the biggest moves up or down for the day, which seems extremely appealing to new investors. Any Robinhood user can simply click on the Top Movers column and make ridiculous option or stock trades on those stocks.Many see this way of designing an investment platform as addictive and insecure while others call it the future of modern investing. Another notable detail surrounding Robinhood is its usage of fractional trading where users can buy fractions of shares due to the fact that Robinhood will cover the remaining cost of the share. This detail has allowed over 12 million users to flock to the app in lieu of dishing out big returns on small sums of money. Anybody above the age of 18 can start investing in Robinhood with as little as $1. This is a very appealing concept and it certainly draws in a large volume of clients for Robinhood. So how have investors performed on this revolutionary app? According to Robinhood, users have underperformed the market when holding for more then a month and options traders have lost millions upon millions of dollars. Options trading on Robinhood has been simplified to the bare bones and concepts of options trading. What was once an advanced modern way of investing, that is option trading, has now become a gambling practice which anyone can figure out if using the Robinhood app. So what does Robinhood mean for the future of investing? Will users flock to its adaptive and easy to use app, or will they be strayed away from their lack of history and reputation as a stock brokerage? Time is to tell, but one thing is clear, Robinhood has been changing the investment game for decades to come, but the only question is, is this innovative change of investing for the good or for the young gamblers?