Do you know what's cool? Not just for more than $ 1 billion, but to save $ 1 billion for your customers. Today, the application of no-cost stock trading Robinhood announced that it has reached 3 million registered accounts, $ 100 billion in its application, and 1 billion commissions saved considering competitors like E * Trade cost $ 7 per transaction.
And now, Robinhood gets a web version where beyond swap stocks, you can search them with its financial news feed, check analysts' buy-sell valuations, and compare them with its collections playlist style.
Baiju Bhatt (left) and Vladamir Tenev (right) founders of Robinhood
Long-time competitors like Scottrade could pile up a ton of data on a web page, but that does not necessarily teach you financial literacy. This is something that Robinhood users need because half of them are novice traders. Co-founder Baiju Bhatt tells me, "If the goal is to get people to learn to invest, to improve, to be informed, I think our approach is the best."
The raising of $ 110 million from Robinhood, valued at $ 1.3 billion from April, was clearly used quickly. But the launch on the web refers to Robinhood's original mission. In 2013, before launching its launch campaign with the intention of allowing you to trade stocks for free, Robinhood wanted to be a crowdsourced investment advisory platform. With new features like the ability to see the average price of Robinhood users paid for a stock and if it's popular on the app, Robinhood is starting to get back on the social fintech path.
The design of the web application was based on a major overview of Robinhood's research. "When young people are investing in the stock market, their behaviors are much closer to the way people are browsing products like Spotify or Amazon, rather than traditional investment products," says Bhatt [Disclosure: I knew the startup’s co-founders from college a decade ago].
This led Robinhood to build collections that group stocks by vertical in sortable playlists, so if you want to find real estate companies with buy valuations that are popular on Robinhood, you can find those which you have never heard of. Meanwhile, the Robinhood Web Home page displays a personalized news feed of finance stocks on the stocks you are trading. To support Amazon style comparisons, the purchase and sale notes are accompanied by a breakdown of the bull and bear cases provided by Morning Star.
On the mobile, Robinhood was far ahead, but being on the web would expose him to more competition. He might even wake up some sleeping giants who have written the boot as a mobile toy. Meanwhile, opening stocks on the web opens up new security threats. The startup will have to keep everyone's money locked up because a breach could ruin the trust that he has built.
But perhaps more impressive than all the new features and features is the fact that Robinhood has kept its promise to use technology to make the stock market trading so effective that it has not to charge users. While E * Trade has 3,600 employees to support its 3.3 million users, Robinhood supports 3 million merchants with just 100 employees. By trading heavy sales offices overhead for a lean engineering team. Robinhood has brought commissions back to zero where dinosaurs can not compete.