I Invested $500 with Robinhood - Tour, My Gain/Losses and Pros & Cons

hi everyone this is a fungus spender and today I'm going to be talking to you about the investing platform Robinhood I invested a little over $500 on the platform about one month ago and today I'm going to be sharing what I invested in my gains and losses a quick tour of the platform and pros and cons on robhinhood but first if you're new to my channel I would love you to subscribe my channel is all about getting out of debt staying out of debt organizing your finances and increasing your net worth so let's get started so I must say that I didn't really know much about the platform Robinhood before I decided to give it a try I would see videos pop up on my YouTube feed every so often people would ask me for my opinion on the platform Robinhood that I couldn't give any answers because I never checked it out for myself I decided to just jump right in create an account and just give it a try so if you don't know anything about Robin Hood Robin Hood is a free investing platform where you can buy stocks ETFs options and crypto currencies they have an online version and they have an app for your phone so you can purchase stocks wherever you are or you can just do it on your computer so like I said first I'm going to give you a quick tour of the platform and then I'm going to talk about what I purchased and how I did and then I'm going to give you pros and cons and I have left markers in my description box letting you know exactly when I'm talking about each subject so you can just go ahead and skip over to the part that most interests you so let's start with this tour ok so this is the home screen of Robin Hood it's pretty bear it has this black screen with white letters and red and green and it's kind of giving me day trader vibes so on the Left we have our top movers which are the stocks that have had the biggest gains or the biggest losses for the day and then underneath that they have the recent news so it's just information on various stocks that have been in the news in the last couple of days on the right hand side they show my stocks here a little bit of information on like a high performing cryptocurrency and then they show a watch list of the watch list are you know this bear popular stocks that people are interested in like Apple and Twitter and Tesla and Netflix so now let's say you want to purchase a stock and you want to purchase stock in Home Depot you would go ahead and type in Home Depot and click on that stock and then here it shows the purchase price it shows tags they call them collection so this stock is in the retail collection construction and building materials so if you click on this it'll show other socks in that collection now you can only buy whole shares so if I want to buy share I can select one and select two but if I do 2.5 it's not gonna actually let me purchase it even though it looks like it for two seconds then you click on review order to actually purchase a stock as you can see here I have $16.98 in my buying power meaning I cannot afford to buy the stock it gives you a little bit more information underneath about the company and about the company in the news as well so let's say I want to look at stocks in the retail collection I can click on retail so now I'm in the retail section and I can sort this various ways I can sorted by popularity I can sort it by analysts ratings so if I want to see the most recommended stocks in retail for their for Robin Hood I can do so here so I can look at camping world David Buster's etc now the one thing they don't do on their home page or anywhere else is have a place where you can filter by collection so if you want to look at different sectors you kind of have to just guess to see what collections they might have so I can look up real estate that's pretty simple they have real estate collections but they also have collections by popularity so I could use the 100 most popular and get that collection or I can do under 25 to find popular discounted stocks so most popular under 25 so now how did I do so like I said I depart five hundred dollars into the account and it took a couple of days for the money to settle so once the money was available for me to purchase the stocks I would lock back into the account and then it was time for me to purchase stocks and they don't have like the stache' they don't have like prepackaged bundles where you're like oh I'm gonna invest in you know a bunch of stocks in the tech industry or in the automotive industry you pretty much need to know what you want to buy because you're just gonna log in and start searching for stocks so what I did was I looked at the top movers section and I listed the items that were in the watchlist and I looked at the items that were in the newsfeed to get ideas of stocks to them I might want to buy and so one stock that stuck up for me was that character of pew dicks and I don't I don't even know I all I know about the company is what I've read on Robin Hood but it had a 100% analyst spy so I decided okay that's gonna be one of my socks to that buy and then from there so you can see on the screen I also bought Pandora I bought Fitbit I bought Southwest and i bought some shares in dropbox now what I really wanted to do was to purchase one hundred dollars in each stock but they don't offer a fractional shares so for some stocks I purchased $90 worth others I might have purchased up to $120 and my original purchase price was four hundred and ninety three thousand twenty four cents as you can see from the screen I made gains in three different stocks and I had losses in two socks so I gained on my stocks with Tyra therapeutics Pandora and Southwest for Cara I made thirteen forty-four Pandora nineteen dollars and eight cents and Southwest six dollars and seventy eight cents and I had losses on Fitbit and Dropbox Fitbit was 54 cents and Dropbox was ten dollars and 94 cents though I should say they definitely do not recommend you to buy Dropbox so that was just me you know being contrary so overall I invested 493 dollars and twenty four cents and my current value is 520 1.6 cents so my account has grown by $27 and 6 Angoor 5% which i think is pretty good for just one month if you looked at if you saw my tour you saw that my account balance was higher than 521 I do have 1666 or 1698 in purchasing power which was just leftover money from it from a few transactions now pros and cons so let's start with the pros so like I said it's a completely free account you're not paying for anything you purchase your stock and that's it you don't have to pay annual fee of monthly fee a trading fee no types of fees and I think that is the biggest Pro because a lot of times I remember there was the time when I was first starting to invest many many years ago and I would buy stocks and like a trade would be 495 or 995 and I kept hearing about different methods where you should be buying stocks once a week or once a month and I'm thinking this is just eating away from the money I can use to invest and so this really lowers the barrier to entry where you're just paying for the stock and you're not paying anyone else a fee so another pro is that they have a pretty simple interface there's no bells and whistles as you can see I'm someone that likes all the bells and all the whistles so this may not be a pro for me but it's a pro for other people another pro is that they do have analyst recommendations which can be helpful when you're just looking to figure out well I don't even know what stocks to buy but not at least I can sort by the sector and then I can see you know what analysts are suggesting that you purchase so I think that is very helpful and light I do appreciate the fact that they build news into the platform so a lot of times you if you want to look up a stock or if you want to just hear news you have to go someplace else but here it's right there in your face like here the stocks that are doing the biggest or losing the most right right in the platform so here are my cons so I don't like the fact that you cannot buy fractional shares and I know that with larger investing platforms you can't buy fractional shares either but with these new disruptor investor apps a lot of them are letting you buy fractional shares into stock and I think that is very important to get you know someone that doesn't have as much money as the other the next person to get started in investing you might want to invest in Netflix but you don't have 300 or 400 dollars to buy one share but at least you can put in $100 today and the next week can do it another or next month however you want to do it so that you can at least get into the gap another con is that it doesn't allow you to reinvest dividends which is very important I like when I get a dividend that the money just gets reinvested into my stocks and I just automatically purchase more and more shares without me having to do any work so with this I got dividends from Southwest and I it's just it's only 32 cents but it's sitting in my purchasing power and as I gain more more investments it's gonna send my purchasing power and so I have enough to buy another share of stock wherever I want to buy another con is that you cannot also invest so everyone knows that I love betterment I have links to betterment videos below but what I love about that system is that you schedule your investments with them and every two weeks or every time you get paid however you have your schedule you automatically invest into your investment account and that has like been a game-changer in my investing life where I'm not thinking about wait did I invest this month do I need to look at a calendar do it like how am I gonna set this reminder to invest so with Robin Hood you have to take that active role and log into your account you know however often you want and setting up your investments it'll go through the next day but it's not you know an auto invest what they do have they do lets you purchase option contracts so if you are watching a stock and the price dips to a certain level it'll automatically trigger that you know option to buy or the option to sell but in terms of auto investing no can't do that now who would I recommend Robin Hood to I would recommend Robin Hood to the person who buys stocks on a regular basis like you not a day trader where you're buying and selling every single day and throughout the day but someone that likes to purchase stocks on a regular basis this is perfect because it's free you don't have to pay that five dollar a ten dollar Commission you can just buy as many socks as you want and there's with however many companies and never pay a fee I also recommend this to people who pretty much know what it is they want to buy like you already know how to build a diverse portfolio and you don't need that much help you know I want to buy 10 shares this duck I want to buy thought shows that this stock like you're very clear on what your goals are this is perfect for you now who do I not recommend this to I don't recommend this for that person who has no investments and is looking to invest a lot of money there's there's people out there who are not investing in their 401 K 403 B who don't have an IRA who don't have anything like that but for some reason have a large lump sum of money and are just looking to invest No do that at your own risk but I would not recommend that to you I would say if you have a large sum of money you want to put that money in a diversified portfolio and then if you want to take a little bit of money and play around with it well then you can play around and purchase some shares of whatever sucked with Robin Hood but I would not you know all of a sudden I have say I have no experience in investing I have this large lump sum of money I'm just gonna go put all of my money in a couple of stock and see what happens this is this is not for you this is a simple platform deceptively simple platform so I think it's really for more for people who really know what they're doing so will I continue to use it I think so actually no I definitely will continue to use it honestly throughout this last month I wanted to go ahead and start investing more but I figure you know what I wanted to see what happened to my initial $500 investment before I started adding investments to it so I'm nothing gonna keep using it I feel confident that it's okay for me because I do have my 401 K my Roth IRA a traditional IRA betterment so this is just something where I'm not even gonna put that much money in it on a regular basis but maybe you know every month maybe I'll invest like a $50 or $100 just to like continuously increase on my investments and full disclosure about me I don't actually like buying individual stocks it's a little nerve-racking to me because I I in the past have picked up a couple of really good winners but I've picked way more duds in individual individual stocks so I I'm definitely gonna be utilizing that analyst rating to pick my stocks that I decide to purchase and I'm also going to do a little historical analysis before I buy a stock so if a stock is like trading really high and I noticed that well over the last year or over the last five years this is the highest is trading at I probably point to actually wait until the cut the price has come back down to you know average to make my purchase so that's gonna be my strategy going forward easing Robinhood so I hope you like this video if you do be sure to hit like hit subscribe click on those bill notifications if you want to see more videos like this and share with your friends also comment below and you again he can find me on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook at focus vendor or at wwlp.com thanks bye

Channel: FocusedSpender

Views: 632,769

Rating: 4.913518 out of 5

Keywords: Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, Generational Wealth, How to get out of debt, Get out of debt fast, investments, stocks, bonds, IRA, roth ira, traditional ira, mutual funds, etfs, betterment, wealthfront, robinhood, m1 finance, personal capital, how to start investing, investments for beginners, how to buy stocks, how to pick stocks, how to sell stocks, capital gains, tax loss harvesting, day trading, cryptocurrency, bitcoin, tutorial

Id: o4V-6TYOw4w

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 16 2018