Very sad. The extraordinary push by firms such as Robinhood to encourage unprepared individuals to participate in day trading is a troubling development. They

Very sad. The extraordinary push by firms such as Robinhood to encourage unprepared individuals to participate in day trading is a troubling development. They can call it "investing" all they want, but it is clear that unlimited commission-free trading without any meaningful vetting encourages uninformed day trading. The markets benefit from having a highly diverse set of entities, each with its own particular area of expertise that gets pooled together. The markets are damaged by high rates of uninformed trading, which only promote instability and general disfunction. More importantly, these traders have overwhelming odds of getting hurt. The only ones who benefit from such trading are 1) firms like Robinhood who get paid for their unsophisticated order flow, 2) market makers, and 3) informed entities pushing markets back towards efficiency. Speaking as one who benefits, I can say that we would all be better off as a society without this particular order flow. I think there should be a limit on the rate of commission-free trading until an individual can demonstrate a reasonable level of proficiency. A firm like Robinhood could do some good if they provided a great paper trading environment and tools that allowed users to evaluate expected profit and variance in particular strategies they want to pursue. Once a trader demonstrates profit beyond random noise, commission-free trades could be gradually increased. I think this would encourage people to learn how to provide services of real value to markets through their trading or else recognize they are unable to be profitable. Unfortunately, I doubt Robinhood would ever do this as it would significantly undermine their current business model.