Robinhood App: Trial and Tribulations with my application

in #trading7 years ago

A couple months ago I stumbled upon Robinhood: https://www.robinhood.com while using Stocktwits and SeekingAlpha for my trading and investing research. It is a mobile app that allows you to trade stocks with no commission fees. In December 2017 they announced that they will offer no commission trades on options as well. Every time you buy and sell a stock or options you are charged a broker fee on both the buy and sell.

I currently use etrade for both stock and options trading and while etrade’s fees for stocks is cheap; options are unbearably “expensive” since I only trade small lot sizes for options. The fees take 30% of my profits before taxes. Therefore, I was excited by the new Robinhood offer and signed up several weeks ago.

I sent several emails to their customer support about my application but heard nothing from their email only customer support until today. It basically said we cannot accept my cash transfers to the account as we cannot approve our account at this time. The email did not mention why they could not approve the application and gave me no recourse.

Has anyone here had such a hard time getting their Robinhood account approved. No commission trades would greatly increase my profits and it is would make small profit options trades worth while.