You couldn’t do this yesterday, because Robinhood didn’t exist yesterday. But the Robinhood app is out today. It’s a zero-commission brokerage app, meant as a gateway to the investment world for young or novice investors. It’s all mobile and there is no minimum either. (Unless you want to buy a share of Berkshire Hathaway–$226,538 per share at the moment–while you’re on the treadmill.)
But wait, there’s no such thing as a free lunch! We’re not naive. Right: Robinhood plans to make money selling upgraded services, like margin lending. It was founded by two physics students from–you guessed!–Stanford. Twentysomethings Baiju Bhatt and Vladimir Tenev had half a million people on the waiting list to download the Robinhood app before its launch today. Investors include Marc Andreesen, Snoop Dogg and Jared Leto, of course.
