Robinhood’s Trading Limits Send Users Into Small Brokers’ Arms
- M1, Acorns and Public see big sign-up gains in January
- Smaller firms often don’t offer Robinhood’s bells and whistles
This article is for subscribers only.
Robinhood Markets’ stock-trading clampdown sent outraged retail investors scurrying to find other trading platforms. Small-scale brokerage firms were waiting with open arms.
In the three days following Jan. 28, when Robinhood limited trading of heavily shorted stocks, Acorns Advisers LLC gained 100,000 new customers, according to a company spokesperson, a pace that signals sharp increase over the 258,000 verified accounts it added in all of January 2020. New brokerage accounts at M1 Finance LLC at one point topped 20,000 a day -- nearly triple its average sign-up rate, according to a spokesperson. And a company representative said that the number of Public Holdings Inc.’s trading app clients grew 20-fold.