Robinhood | The Legend Awakens

The casino is opened & better than ever.

Before starting. My tone might seem a bit accusing or ironic but it is not targeted at Robinhood. Their business is unhealthy at its core as they rely on transaction fees and therefore on volume. Their products are meant to stimulate their users to transact as much as possible; win or loss doesn’t matter, only volume matters but we should never blame the tools. Robinhood’s job is to force those transactions, that’s how it is. And damn, they’re good at it.

It is the first time I talk about the company and as you' understood, they’re a stock broker; a stock broker 2.0, proposing great applications & webservices using recent technologies, focusing on today’s users’ priorities - fluidity, ergonomy, design and low fees. It was about time someone came to kick the legacy brokers & their shitty websites, and that someone is Robinhood.

The company is now trying to attract investors & traders to its platform with very strong incentives like deposit match or portfolio transfer bonuses etc… They announced even more incentives during this event.

And it is working very, very well as more & more are transferring their assets and the company is growing rapidly.

This event, which they called “The Legend Awakens” was meant to present the new features coming over the next months and I’ll be honest: I am very jealous as a European not to have access to any of this… This is how great their app is, nothing in our countries comes close to it.

Event.

Maybe a rapid word about the event itself which was pretty good to my opinion. This is very subjective but Vlad (Robinhood’s CEO) speaks pretty well and the dynamic with its teams were pretty good, with cool lights and scene design...

A pretty well done event.

Live features.

They started by reviewing what was released this year, a busy year without any doubt. They started by lowering their fees, something they can do thanks to a much better technical infrastructure and now have the lowest on the market.

They released the very well known 24/5 or “overnight trading”, allowing users to continue buying & selling when the market is closed, although liquidity is pretty tight as it relies on Robinhood’s users. The company already saw $30B of volume since the feature was released, a strong demand and a product which will certainly be adopted by many others over time.

They also released option returns simulator, joint account which Vlad commented that “Some of our traders wanted to share with family. Some of our traders did not want that.”. We can understand why. Or realized P&L, a feature I still wonder why it doesn’t exist everywhere and why it took so long to be implemented.

As you can see, Robinhood is now a complete & attractive platform, even more with the incentives. But it’s getting much better.

New Features.

Index Options.

We’re going to start with the least excitingbut necessary one for many to do some more speculation or to hedge other positions. An interesting feature with once more, the lowest fees on the market.

Futures.

Now it’s getting interesting but besides adding a very demanded feature, what matters even most is the UX because there are no doubts anymore: Robinhood’s designers are the best and I hope they’ve been paid in stock options.

This is what it looks like.

The team called it the ladder. You can buy, put limit orders or sell in two taps and everything you need is displayed already. No new interface to do anything, you do everything on the ladder. Scroll, double tap and you’re in a position or your order is set.

Very, very impressive in terms of UX. Pricing is again, simple & industry-leading.

Robinhood Legend.

The heart of the presentation.

Robinhood is proposing a great product, beautiful & ergonomic, fully customizable, fluid, very intuitive and with once more, minimum clicks needed to open or close positions & the lowest fees on the market.

They’re also eating into TradingView or other chart business as everything will be available for free with tons of crazy (and useless) indicators. Customizability will also allow you to use 175 screens so you can lose even more money in HD.

And where they are really excellent to my opinion, they added a noise & light systems based on your daily performance, which will certainly add to your frustration on a bad day and to your greed on good days, forcing you either way to participate in the market when you shouldn’t. And it’s all for free.

I told you: they’re good.

Conclusion.

I’ll conclude as I started: Robinhood is not your friend. But as a business, they are doing everything perfectly.

They burn their own cash to incentivize users to migrate their accounts to their platforms, and it is working. They now propose, without any doubts, the best products on the market - easy to use, fluid, beautiful, customizable & cheap, both on smartphone & computer. And they designed everything with the most efficient UX, allowing you to interact with the market without any friction.

Everything is of course meant for you to spend time on the platform and to take positions you shouldn’t take, to force you to do so with useless colorful or noisy stimulations and to do it all so easily that you won’t have time to rethink.

And the worst thing is that I really, really want it.