Sublime

New technologies and business models have made investing accessible. Anyone with a smartphone, for instance, can use Robinhood. Robinhood also popularized zero-fee trading, which forced the hands of brokerages like E*Trade and Charles Schwab. Commission-free trading is now the norm.

Taking a product or service that people have had to pay for and making it free is perhaps the most powerful way to democratize access to it. Robinhood democratizes access to investing by offering a commission-free platform.

Buying and selling stocks is a great way to invest your earnings and make extra money, but with every trade you have to pay some commission to a broker. Or do you? The stock-trading app Robinhood lets you make trades for free.[326] That’s right, zero commission. So how do they stay in business? There are two main ways Robinhood makes money.[327] Fi

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additional purchases beyond what you can currently afford.[328] The second way is pretty clever. Robinhood earns interest from unused money sitting in users’ accounts in much the same way that you earn interest by stashing your unused money in a bank.[329] As you can see, apps are getting crafty with their business models. Let’s finish the chapter

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From its inception, Robinhood was designed to profit by selling its customers’ trading data to the very sharks on Wall Street who have spent decades—and made billions—outmaneuvering investors. In fact, an analysis reveals that the more risk Robinhood’s customers take in their hyperactive trading accounts, the more the Silicon Valley startup profits... See more

Robinhood didn’t invent this selling of orders—E-Trade, for example, earned about $200 million in 2019 through the practice. Unlike most of its competitors, though, Robinhood charges the quants a percentage of the spread on each trade it sells, versus a fixed amount. So when there is a large gap between the bid and asked price, everyone wins—except... See more

Public Robinhood - a wacky part of investing in crypto is it's public. So there could be a consumer experience built around that. It's like Robinhood for crypto where it's a consumer experience to buy/sell crypto. But it's also public and social and you compete against your friends and have a public profile. Maybe it starts with collectibles tradin... See more