Robinhood raises $50M

My experience with Robinhood has been completely negative. I recently worked on a loan and needed to show the Robinhood transfer to my bank. Since there's no web interface you can't get the current month printout. There's no phone number to call, and it took them 3 days to reply to the zendesk ticket only to say they can't do anything and I have to wait til end of the month. The actual statement is only available a week after beginning of the month. Never again. I closed out my account and deleted the app.

From what I can see, the only way they differentiate themselves from their well established competitors is by not charging commissions. Yet I don&#x27;t see how their costs of running a brokerage would be lower than their competitors, and they don&#x27;t seem to have any revenue streams their competitors don&#x27;t also have. So how will they eventually be profitable? Discount brokerage isn&#x27;t an especially profitable industry to begin with<p>Competing on price alone doesn&#x27;t seem like a good strategy to creating a valuable company.

I wish they had an Android app. Hopefully, it&#x27;s in the works, because I would definitely try it out.

Maybe they can use some of that $50M to fix their broken password recovery.

I love Robinhood because it has made trading so accessible to me. I started out by putting in $100 and as I gained confidence and started doing more research, I started adding more funds. I&#x27;ve tried many services in the past - Schwab, ETrade, Scottrade, and they all felt a bit too &quot;heavy-weight&quot; for me. I don&#x27;t have significant amounts of income invested, I just want something low friction that I can use as a learning tool. I have friends who are more &quot;serious&quot; investors and they don&#x27;t use Robinhood, but I see Robinhood satisfying a different use case at the moment.

It&#x27;s quite interesting they&#x27;re moving to Australia after the US.<p>Usually, companies goes to EU first while moving overseas, but it appears it&#x27;s becoming more and more bureaucratic, so why spend its limited resources?

This company is going to put serious pressure on the pretty high commissions that the discount brokers are currently enjoying.

&quot;Stop paying up to $65 for every trade.&quot; I am assuming this is in reference to 10K+ trades not the average trade that last time I checked was around $19.<p>Either way Congrats on the big raise. Good move on focusing next on a financially savvy market like Australia!

Saving $2.4m on $500m traded implies that typical trade &lt; $300.. Looks like they want to make back the money they lose on margin trading, margins for them will likely not be that great as a result - a good corollary is spread bet providers in the UK tbh

When are they coming to the UK?

This is sweet. Short term trading with no commission costs? Great.