Why I'm leaving Robinhood

Young Smart Money

Robinhood has crossed a line...well a number of lines. I'm leaving Robinhood and never looking back. In this video, I'll break down the 4 reasons I'm pulling my money out of the popular investing app.

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I started investing with Robinhood back in 2017 and was initially really excited about the prospect of a commission-free trading platform. Before switching to Robinhood I was using Fidelity and paying $4.95 every time I wanted to buy or sell a position.

The first few months of using Robinhood went well, but later in 2017, the problems with Robinhood started to pop up. The first thing that became apparent to me was Robinhood's reckless business practices. After signing up for the service, the SEC fined Robinhood $1.25 million because Robinhood did not tell investors that they were selling their order flow.

Personally, I didn't assume that this was malicious, just that Robinhood was following the Silicon Valley mentality to "move fast and break things" and disclosing their business model to investors wasn't a top priority. However, when I'm holding thousands of dollars at an online brokerage, I'm not sure that I want them to be moving fast and breaking things.

Then came the outages. In the beginning of March 2020, there were 2 significant outages that caused users not to be able to log on to their Robinhood accounts for multiple days. As a long-term investor, this didn't impact me too much, but these were some of the best trading days in some time and to be totally locked out from them is a big deal to active traders on Robinhood. Since these March outages, there have been 50+ additional Robinhood outages. Not great.

Next comes the gamification. Robinhood's use of confetti and bright colors has armed a new fleet of young men with all of the tools they need to become ineffective day traders. It's been shown time and time again that inexperienced day traders that don't trade for a living consistently lose money over the long-term. The traders on the other side of many of these Robinhood trades are sophisticated traders who are able to profit from the inflows of new money to the markets from Robinhood users. This trains younger people to think of the stock market as a gambling machine and a losing game which is not something I'm about.

Last big strike is the hacks. Recently, around 2,000 Robinhood accounts were hacked and drained of all the cash within them. Robinhood's support was unable to help users who saw unauthorized transfers out of their Robinhood accounts and has yet to provide any solution to these Robinhood users who are currently out thousands of dollars.

So I'm leaving. And I'm moving all of my investments over to Fidelity. As a time-tester brokerage that already holds my retirement accounts, I figure it just makes sense to consolidate all of my investments over there. Fidelity has the core features of Robinhood that I like: fractional shares, commission-free trades, DRIP and will get the job done for me.

Now it's up to you whether you want to keep investing with Robinhood, but I'd recommend you to stay on top of the news as it relates to the places you keep your money. You worked hard for it after all!

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:35 What Robinhood Did Well

1:46 Robinhood's Reckless Business Practices

3:53 Robinhood's Repeated Outages

5:56 Robinhood's Gamification of Investing

10:10 Robinhood's Repeated Hackings

12:23 Where I Am Moving My Money

14:07 Outro