> Ah, I didn't know they made money off that part of it. I suppose you give up some privacy/data when they resell your order, similar to using Facebook or Google. It's a slick business model, I didn't even realize it.

Your also giving up better trade execution ie paying more for shares. Robinhood is good for getting your feet wet but people should switch brokers as soon as possible.

Why not just get a vanguard / schwab / fidelity account then and buy their no fee ETFs?

If all your doing is passive investing then yes a Vanguard account would be ideal. I'm not sure on the fees for chwab and fidelity so I can't comment on those. For my passive investments I use a Vanguard account for my trading(active investing) I use Interactive Brokers.

Yeah, I plan on moving my shares to a broker with the nice features like DRIP/partial share purchases and so on once I accumulate enough capital to make the $5 trade fees worth it.

If you can handle the minimum amount to open an account(10K) Interactive Brokers is awesome, Commissions are usually just a $1 in and out. If your under 25 then it's 3K to open an account.

IB is good if you trade enough to make the monthly fee worth it.

But I execute maybe, 4 trades per year. E-Trade / Ameritrade / Scottrade are good enough, and offer me Options trading and other useful features.

Like a website, so I can trade on a computer properly damn it.

> IB is good if you trade enough to make the monthly fee worth it.

Yea valid point. I make 2 to 4 trades a week so IB makes sense for me. Plus I signed up before I was 25 so my monthly fees are still only $3 instead of $12. Plus I do enough trades that my monthly fees are waived.

that's bullshit, sorry. If they sell your order to a firm with good execution, you could very well get a much better price than from a firm that doesn't sell your order flow.