Ah, shares of shares. Through Robinhood no less. Sounds like a great plan for the platform which has had how many comically massive mistakes over the past few months? Are they going to let r/wsb leverage these 100x as well?<p>Don't get me wrong, I love some of what they're doing....I just don't trust them with my money.
The whole idea of "shares" is a pointless legacy concept. What really matters is the fraction of the company you own. Back when trading was conducted using physical paper stock certificates it made sense to have discrete individual shares but the concept has now outlived its usefulness. In the future it would make more sense to just say, for example, that you can invest $12345.67 to purchase 0.0000000058% of company XYZ.
FYI, Folio has been offering fractional shares for over a decade. They're terrible at marketing and don't have as slick an app, but they control their full stack down to the DTCC. They cover their traces in patents, so I'm not sure Robinhood is doing the same thing as Folio has battle-tested <a href="https://www.folioinvesting.com/folioinvesting/brokerage-features/dollar-based-investing-and-fractional-shares/" rel="nofollow">https://www.folioinvesting.com/folioinvesting/brokerage-feat...</a><p>(I do not work for Folio)
Do you really own anything, or are you just lending money to Robinhood? Does your fractional buy get reported to the transfer agent for the stock? Do you get the annual report? Voting rights?
This isn’t really a new thing, DRIPs have had this forever, but nice to see it available especially when looking at purchases like AMZN where maybe you can only afford purchase 2.75 shares or something.
I don't quite understand the appeal of investing via phone app. Investing my life savings (any any amount really) is one of the few things I would absolutely <i>not</i> want to do on a phone touchscreen.<p>When I heard of Robinhood I thought it would fail for sure... I guess that shows how much I can predict startup success.
I'm really curious if this is a legitimate growth driver for brokerages and what % of trading volume is represented by a buyer looking to buy < 1 share in a certain company.<p>It feels very incremental to me.<p>It also feels like a feature that is representative of something that would only happen at the "top" of the market.
Half a decade ago I researched starting a fractional trading platform, and I gave up on the idea because I decided it was illegal.<p>Now in this thread people are saying multiple such platforms exist. Did I make a mistake or get something wrong? Or are they applying some kind of workaround? I can't remember why I thought it wasn't allowed.
I heard Robin Hood earns revenue by operating a trading dark pool. Is this true? And if so, wouldn't using Robinhood be like jumping into a shark tank?