Robinhood! The app that changed the investment landscape for ordinary investors in the US is finally coming to the UK. It’s been talked about for some time, but it’s just been announced that its going to land in early 2020. It really is exciting times in the investment world right now.
Being based in the UK we’ve not had the pleasure of using the app ourselves but have heard endless stories from those across the pond about how revolutionary Robinhood has been.
For those wondering what these two guys are babbling on about – Robinhood is of course the pioneer of commission-free investing.
This is not just a claim. They’ve got over 6 million customers in the US and changed how investing is done forever; essentially forcing all the major US investment platforms to follow suit and laying to rest those much-loathed trading fees.
Here in the UK we’re always a little behind the pace but we’ve already seen a few investment apps bring commission free trading to the UK including Freetrade and Trading 212.
When it comes to the UK market is Robinhood too late to the game? And what can they do differently that the likes of Freetrade aren’t already doing?
Here we’re going to look some of the cool things we can expect from a Robinhood UK Investment app.
Editors note: For those who can’t wait, check the MU Offers page and grab your free shares worth up to £200 when you open an account with Freetrade, the current king of free investment apps in the UK.
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What Can We Expect?
Looking at an article from Techcrunch, Robinhood are claiming,
“It starts with our core platform: unlimited commission free trades, no account minimums, and access to a huge range of equities from both the US and from across the world,”
“Secondly, we will enable instant deposit, instant trading, without any foreign exchange fees. Users can fund very easily from any U.K. bank using a phone or debit card and withdraw just as easily”.
That all sounds great but doesn’t appear to be much more than what we currently have. Freetrade and Trading 212 are already offering most of this after all, and are very good Free-Trading apps.
Nevertheless, we welcome Robinhood with open arms as the increased competition can only be good for us investors.
The current free apps in the UK are lacking additional features, so it will be interesting to see what Robinhood offer. Although it is still very early days and improvements are being made all the time.
According to Techcrunch, Robinhood will also include information to help with trading, including videos from the Wall Street Journal, CNN and Reuters, along with features to help users keep track of their investments, such as price movement alerts, analyst ratings, earnings, and being able to dial into earnings reports.
This sounds awesome and we think the current assembly of free apps is not yet excelling in this area.
However, we doubt that even Robinhood will be able to deliver as much as a fee-based platform but we’re eager to find out.
We might be wrong here and let’s hope we are. How great would it to have an all singing and dancing investment platforms that doesn’t charge?
According to CNBC, Robinhood have a valuation of $7.6 billion, so they certainly have the financial backing to make this a possibility.
New Investors
Here at Money Unshackled we’re on a mission to get more people thinking and talking about money… actually not just talking – we want people taking action with their money.
Young people in UK don’t invest, which is a travesty. It is so easy to make a fortune in the markets over the years, but nobody is doing it.
Apps like Robinhood and Freetrade are not just stealing customers from the existing platforms but they are democratising investing and opening it up to new and young investors, which otherwise may have felt that investing was inaccessible.
The ability to buy shares in exciting companies like Apple and Google using your mobile without being charged is so incredible.
Join the Waitlist?
At the moment you can join their waiting list. We think the idea here is to pretend that there’s some sort of urgency to join up in order to get more people to rush to their app.
We remember Freetrade doing something similar when they launched but we’re confident that when the app becomes available, they will let everyone use it pretty much straight away.
We are even tempted to say that you shouldn’t rush to the app because they could even offer you a free share to join because of the tough competition.
Almost all the apps and platforms are trying to entice you to join and so are giving away free money. You can check the offers page to see what offers we’ve managed to find for you.
We would expect that Robinhood will initially be giving nothing away but once the initial early adopters have signed up, we would then expect them to join the ‘refer a friend’ revolution.
We’ll certainly be getting in touch with them to see if they can offer anything to our viewers, so look out for this.
FSCS Protection?
Normally UK citizens are protected against platform failure by the Financial Service Compensation Scheme, which is a UK protection scheme.
However, according to Robinhood UK’s own website it seems that protection will instead come from a US scheme. This does seem unusual as all the investment platforms we’ve dealt with previously were either UK protected or occasionally European protected via the EU passporting laws.
Is it just US Stocks?
Again, according to Robinhood you can trade 3,500 US stocks plus over 1,000 global stocks listed on NYSE and Nasdaq. This isn’t clear on which stocks will be available, but it seems that it is only US listed stocks.
Let’s hope that this is just for the launch and UK listed stocks and ETFs are just around the corner.
If not, then we think this would put them at a massive disadvantage when compared to Freetrade and Trading 212.
Do you think Robinhood is the gamechanger we’ve all been waiting for or is Freetrade and Trading 212 already doing way more? Let us know in the comments section.
