Robinhood S-1 IPO

Looks like it:

"RHF, one of our broker-dealer subsidiaries, is a member of the selling group for this offering. We expect the underwriters to reserve approximately 20 to 35% of the shares of our Class A common stock offered by this prospectus for RHF, acting as a selling group member, to allocate for sale to Robinhood customers through our IPO Access feature on our platform. Any such sales will be made at the same initial public offering price, and at the same time, as any other purchases in this offering, including purchases by institutions and other large investors, and in accordance with customary broker-dealer practices and procedures."

People complain about unfair advantages regular "retail" people have but Robinhood has made access to stocks & options a lot easier. They've made it easy to get the cheapest rates possible on portfolio backed loans. They're starting to try & give some type of IPO access, although I can't comment on the value of that. If they start to offer IRAs & other tax advantaged accounts, plus a way for non accredited investors to invest early in Start-Ups they would have hit a grand slam in my opinion.

Obviously while I see the above as a lot of great things, in the wrong hands people can do a ton of damage to themselves with margin, options or trading risky stocks. Robinhood, at the demands of critics, has been improving their information in their UI to help people better understand the risks. And yes, their bash the button to get early crypto access shall never be forgotten & always be a tarnish.

The Robinhood app is far better than anyone else out there for your average investor. ThinkorSwim is the only thing even close & it's far to complicated for most. Otherwise Robinhood is faster, cheaper, better info & overall better user experience. The other companies have all been incredibly behind times, as financial companies are known for.

Side Rant: Robinhood wasn't the only one to run into GameStop issues. There are some people who believe the whole GME debacle was very close to having huge negative implications on the entire market that were going to hurt everyone, whether in the trade or not.

I really don’t understand this “democratizing” thing.

In Spain, banks have allowed to trade on all kinds of assets for ages. Some with low fees. If you wanted to buy a certain asset you could do so in like three clicks.

In the US I know as a fact that some banks like Charles Schwab have also made retail investing accessible for ages…

Robin Hood has “democratized” trading in the sense of aggressively expanding it through marketing, maybe a cool UX (I wouldn’t know), but otherwise I don’t see how it has innovated significantly in the area of retail investing.

Like a sibling commenter is saying it has also popularized day-trading more than anything. The math about day-trading is unequivocal and it may very well be that popularizing this is a net loss for society, or at the very least (yet another?) mechanism for transferring wealth from the middle class to sophisticated elites (I mean, this wouldn’t be a loss if you believe it’s stricly a zero-sum effect, and that wealth is just as well in either set of hands)

To be clear, I may have moral qualms with RH and the popularization of day-trading, but I do believe in free market economics and I think it should exist - I can only hope that in time regular folk become educated about investing and that my transfer theory doesn’t come to fruition.

I’m all open for counterpoints on both my claims that it hasn’t done all that much for democratizing retail investing and that day-trading for the masses may be a bad proposition.

So the Big Short was spot on when it showed the SEC lady using that position to leverage her way into a job in the sector she's supposed to regulate. It makes sense an SEC regulator knows all the ins and outs and would be the best person capable of finding and exploiting loopholes.

It depends on how much you care for the person doing the gambling or drugs and at which stage its at. Being a nanny to everyone doing something 'bad' would be a 24/7 affair.

On a large scale, eventually lots of people will be hurt. Everyone thought they were having lots of fun in 2007, and then people started jumping out of buildings. Those people had family and friends. Many of the young people in the market right now have never seen or gone through that, and if they keep preaching 'stocks only go up' while trading on 40x margin, they will eventually find out that stonks sometimes go down.