[hazard]

It depends on what you want. As others have pointed out, IB is good for a near-pro trading experience. If you don't need margin access, shorting, options, etc you might want to check out Robinhood (disclaimer: I've never used it although it looks nice).

Really though, why do you care about real-time trading anyways? Not being sarcastic; this is an actual question.

[basseq]

I found Robinhood to be useless. Not enough research/discovery tools to do anything other than "buy a specific stock". I also felt like my orders' fulfilled prices were wildly different than quote ticks—to the tune of a 100+ BP (front-running algos?).

[dguaraglia]

Ah, that bullshit! I think you stumbled on the way Robinhood makes money.

When I first joined the Android beta Robinhood had a very clear message before every purchase: "to protect the user from volatility, Robinhood creates market orders as limit orders with a 5% higher price". So, yeah, that means that if you place your market order at $100, they reserve the right to broker it all the way to $105, which is bullshit. On average it won't be that high, but still, if you were planning to make a 0.5% profit, you'll always lose.

The only way to get around that is by creating a proper limit order yourself, setting the price a couple cents the current price (to match the BP you are willing to give up.)

Since I started doing that, things became way more predictable.

[basseq]

Total BS. I'm a big fan of limit orders (though most of my purchases are DCA). Since Robinhood can't do limit orders (or couldn't when I was using it—or I couldn't figure it out), it's useless.

[dguaraglia]

You can do limit orders now! The interface is still kind of clunky, but it works well enough for my use case. Still, I haven't used Robinhood for anything but short term speculation, as a toy.

[dguaraglia]

Well, I love that my post, that actually has some information that might be useful to people using Robinhood, gets downvoted.

[awptimus]

You should always trade by specifying your own limit.

[xasos]

I believe the whole goal around Robinhood is feeless purchase of stocks for beginners. Once you get past a certain threshold of dollars traded, Robinhood isn't the most effective solution. Other apps such as Edge, Fidelity, etc. give you more information as well as more purchasing options.

[lewisl9029]

But to be fair, for most investors, "buy a specific stock" (SPY, other ETFs for diversification) should be all they ever do when it comes to investing. Otherwise they're probably setting themselves up for failure.

[basseq]

If you don't do research, you shouldn't be buying stock. Most people shouldn't buy stocks, period.

[lewisl9029]

I'm honestly confused if we're in disagreement or not.

Let me clarify my position:

I think most people should invest.

And part of that investment should be in the stock market (how big a part depends on their individual age and risk tolerance).

And for most people, the only stocks they should ever buy are ETFs that are passively managed with low fees.

Yes they need to do enough research in as far as to find out that they should only be buying ETFs (and that kind of research does not require any kind of support from their brokerage). But they shouldn't be tempted to do more specific "research" to pick their own stocks because most people who do that are doomed to underperform the market anyways.

So in the end, the fact that Robinhood lacks a decent research platform shouldn't matter to most regular investors because they should only ever buy specific ETFs anyways.

[basseq]

I was probably confused: we are in agreement.