Something about Robinhood just makes me uneasy - clearly their main target market is the small retail investor who is sensitive to a $7/trade fee, but the low friction, mobile-first no fee stock trading experience they've created mostly serves to encourage bad investor behavior i.e. emotional, irrational day trading among people who can least afford it. Now they are "democratizing" margin trading (Robinhood Gold), op…
I think Robinhood does a great job of giving young traders the experience and knowledge of what actual trading is like before they're managing really meaningful amounts of money. College kids trading $500 on Robinhood are going to become 30 year olds who have a much better sense of how markets work and how emotion affects their own trading than college kids who are just instructed to give all their savings to mutual…
I traded on emotion, bought high, sold low, with margin leverage, and with options.
Fortunately I didn't have much money then, so my losses were a large percentage but a relatively small dollar amount.
In hindsight all those losses were inexpensive lessons that have served me very well now that I'm older and have more at stake.
So let the young and inexperienced trade. If you protect them from themselves, you deny them the ability to learn at a relatively low cost, and they'll wind up learning later at a much higher cost.