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by zaltekk 1976 days ago
Unfortunately the account deactivation story is quite poor.

Under Settings > Account Information > Deactivate Account you're just sent to a customer service email form. They say it takes 1-3 business days to process.

As a side note, you have to close out all of your positions and transfer out all of your money before you're allowed to close the account. This seems unusual to me from experiences with other brokers.

From my understanding the average retail broker will allow you to transfer you assets out to another brokerage. You can do this as part of closing your account.

While just transferring money out separately and keeping the account open longer isn't a big deal, there's tax and other financial implications to having to close your positions instead of transfer them. You'll have to realize capital gains. You'll also have multiple banking days in which the price could move up while your money is transferred to another brokerage to re-buy the shares.

4 comments

You should be able to initiate the transfer from the target brokerage. For example in TD Ameritrade, Account -> Contribution -> Account transfer from another brokerage
You should be able initiate an ACATS transfer out of your Robinhood account from another brokerage. https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php . https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/transfer-stocks...

I don't mean to recommend IB as opposed to other brokerages in the current moment, I pasted their link because I transferred an account into IB in this way several months ago so I know it works.

As multiple people mentioned they have added support for transferring with a $75 fee:

https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/transfer-stocks...

I can't find a history that shows when they added this, but it appears they at least added transfers in a few years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/6tre6o/transfer_...

What are y’all moving to/how do you transfer your positions?
You can't transfer your positions, that's what he's saying. Yet another huge downside to Robinhood.
Yep, and they only charge you $75 to leave!