RE: No portfolio/beta analysis - this is a huge problem for me and I can't understand why they would intentionally not build at least a simple portfolio tracker in so you can analyze your investments over time.
I use the app because I don't want to pay the fees, but I've taken to tracking investments in excel which is annoying when it would be pretty trivial to add functionality to the app.
As for your response to the short-term trading concerns. Transfer restrictions don't really matter here. I can still buy/sell stocks as much as I want. I don't have to cash out to my bank in order to trade SPY 10 times a day.
Say you have 10k of settled funds in your account. You can make a total of 10 $1k trades of SPY throughout the day, or 100 $100 trades. Your account is effectively frozen for the next 3 days as the trades "settle" and you are unable to do anything with them. So you would have needed to cash out of your bank 3 days prior to have active funds ready to go for the next day.
AKA Robinhood gets 2-3 days to earn interest on your unsettled/uninvested funds.
But to be fair, they do advertise themselves as a platform for active traders, and the monthly minimums can be waived with a large enough account. I don't qualify for the latter yet, but once I do I'll probably switch over to IB if Robinhood isn't in Canada by then (You can't really beat free).
That being said, I can see that the lack of features might be discouraging for people who want to run a more complex portfolio of options or require a feature like a rudimentary asset allocation model.
The potential here really seems to be for people who hold well-researched single names regularly, mixed with some index ETFs.
No matter how successful they're, I'd argue that it is a drop in the bucket compared to high-frequency trading. I cannot see it hurting the markets.
> Also, the only real reason a commission-free account would be helpful is if you're trading pretty frequently or in very small amounts.
Why? It saves you $10 even if you only trade once every year. It is MORE helpful with many trades, but it is helpful regardless.
> pay $10/trade [..] and have access to some mediocre portfolio analysis, risk analysis, and research tools
Why can't people get these from third parties? A lot of other services provide these tools and information. This de-couples the bundling and allows people to shop around.
I guess my TLDR here is that a trading platform's selling point (for the general public) should be tools first, price second; not price first, aesthetics second.