Robinhood Launches in UK, thoughts?

monkeyman613

Title. 
Is it the best option for small retail UK investors?

subjecttocontract

Never heard of it.

cloud_dog

monkeyman613 said:

Title. 
Is it the best option for small retail UK investors?

It depends if your focus is on trading US stocks.

Not for me, but I'm sure the FOMO / YOLO crowd will be keen on it 😁

flaneurs_lobster

The GameStop caper retail broker?

Are they offering commission-free trading to UK punters?

jameseonline

Robin Hood wasn't in the UK?🤔

EthicsGradient

Perhaps it depends on whether you think they've mended their ways:

But as Robinhood has drawn in 18m funded accounts, with more than half its customers first-time investors, the company has also faced a mountain of criticism from regulators and users alike. It has agreed to pay more than $130m in recent years to settle accusations by regulators, with the most recent fine announced just before the filing.
The Financial Industrial Regulatory Authority (Finra) on Wednesday fined the platform $70m – the agency’s largest penalty ever – over “systemic supervisory failures” and hurting investors by giving them “false or misleading information”.
Finra accused Robinhood of allowing some users to make riskier trades than they were perhaps ready for, failing to make clear to customers that it makes much of its money by routing their trades to Wall Street firms taking the other side, and weak supervision of its technology leading to outages of its service.

Robinhood sees rapid growth even amid lawsuits and historic fine | Investing | The Guardian

eskbanker

Didn't the original Robin Hood make a name for himself by taking money from the impatient and giving it to the patient?

wmb194

monkeyman613 said:

Title. 
Is it the best option for small retail UK investors?

I'd say no; I have an invite to open an account with Robinhood but haven't yet, perhaps I should. It looks like it only offers US shares and people domiciled in the UK & the EU cannot invest in US ETFs so I'd say Trading212 is better as it offers a far broader range of markets. It also has a 1% cashback offer on its Isa for the 24/25 tax year.

Other low cost choices might be Freetrade and CMC Invest but, depending on how often you trade, iWeb  - ultimately owned by Lloyds Bank - is another good choice at £5 per trade, no account fees, offers OEICs (the others mentioned don't) and is currently waiving its usual account opening fee.

george4064

Does anyone know if you can buy/sell call/put options with Robinhood UK platform?

flaneurs_lobster

george4064 said:

Does anyone know if you can buy/sell call/put options with Robinhood UK platform?

I've only had a quick butcher's through their online UK puff but it doesn't look like options are an option to UK punters.

Vanilla trading of ~6000 US-listed companies.

Does pay 5% on uninvested cash.

wmb194

george4064 said:

Does anyone know if you can buy/sell call/put options with Robinhood UK platform?

I saw that there's a free fractional share offer* so just opened an account; no, doesn't look like it and there are no options I can see to be approved to trade them i.e. where you answer questions to test your suitability.

As I thought, US ETFs are not available either, just shares in individual companies.

I deposited a small amount of money and the overall exchange rate was very good, $1.2563 vs current spot as I type of $1.2566. If your focus is individual US companies this could be a good choice.

*It was worth $7.33, wah wah.