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E*Trade, Schwab, and pretty much every other brokerage is playing catchup with RobinHood, which has had free trades on stocks and options from the very beginning. This has caused a steady exodus of users on these commission charging platforms, crossing over to RH. It's especially pronounced with Millenials and Gen-Z / "Post millenials". You may not always get the best pricing, and also there are no market trades as of this writing on RobinHood, but the RH UI handily beats everyone else in terms of ease of use and simplicity. The options trading functionality, for instance is very simple. You select options and then it presents you with a list of (screen) options on whether you think stock will go up, down, or sideways. Based on that, they show you low risk, high risk call options, put options or stangles and straddles. You can place a trade with a couple of taps.
If you want to get more specific and sophisticated, you can choose the expiry dates and select your own call / put options. Compare this to TD Ameritrades UI and Schwab's UI, it looks like some guys from the 90s, stuck in the 90s, are still working on the UI team. Truly clunky, horrible, confusing and annoying. |
Trades take considerably longer to execute than on other platforms. They tend to hide things that are “advanced”, even when it’s important for a trader to learn to use them (for example, the default Buy type is a Market Order instead of a Limit).
Most brokers have protections in place so you don’t shoot yourself in the foot. For example, say you placed a sell order on Robinhood, but want to cancel it. You have to go through 3-4 clicks to get to the order record and cancel it. Oh, and that horrible UX is a chatbot.
Robinhood strikes me as an app that was designed by folks that have limited trading experience. On the mobile app, you can’t select to view your positions by Total Return and simultaneously view your watchlist by Last Price; you must select one or the other. The watchlist of stocks is of course not going to have a total return, so the app just displays “N/A”.
What Robinhood has actually managed to capture is the “bro trader” mentality of the Trump era bull market, and for that they deserve some credit. Check out /r/wallstreetbets for examples. I think a lot of people associate millennials with being broke and having no concept of financial security, however Robinhood is making a name for themselves as the broker of millennials. It’s just a shame RH is so terrible.