Right now; everything that’s happening in the financial markets is historic! We’re witnessing a revolution, with small investors coming together to bring billion-dollar hedge funds to their knees. This dynamic shift of power is a middle-finger to the suits that would normally profit from the losses of such retail investors.
In the process, many of them used the popular trading app Robinhood, until it suspended buying stocks but allowed selling to continue – thus protecting the hedge funds. A clear case of market manipulation.
In this article, we therefore want to present the top 3 Robinhood alternatives, which have proven to be unbiased and allow you to invest safely, free from manipulation.
1. Cake DeFi
The truth is: Even though Robinhood voluntarily suspended stock trading of GameStop, AMC & Co. for an indefinite period of time, traditional investment platforms are often forced to temporarily restrict certain stocks in times of extremely high volatility. Even the popular platforms eToro, WeBull & Trade Republic had to suspend trading for a short period of time.
For example, US President Joe Biden’s economic team says it is closely monitoring the situation, and the head of the largest US stock exchange Nasdaq, Adena Friedman, said that regulators should monitor social media for similar situations in the future:
“If we see a significant rise in the chatter on social media channels…and we also match that up against unusual trading activity, we will potentially halt that stock to allow ourselves to investigate the situation”, Friedman told CNBC.
Internationally known personalities such as PayPal and Tesla founder Elon Musk or YouTuber MrBeast (with over 50 million subscribers worldwide), spoke out in favor of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in response to the events. Elon Musk even tweeted: “In retrospect, it was inevitable”.
The simple reason being that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are completely decentralized and therefore unregulatable.
So even if a central party like Nasdaq or a government wanted to, it could not stop Bitcoin. More and more investors are recognizing this advantage, and so the price of Bitcoin has already been rising steadily for months.
Cake DeFi is a platform that allows to buy Bitcoin – with a major benefit: interest payouts of up to 7.5% on the cryptocurrency. So instead of having your Bitcoin lying around and hoping for the price to rise, you get passive income on your investment, just like with real estate or stocks!
As if that wasn’t enough, Cake DeFi plans to offer decentralized stock trading by the second quarter of this year – a truly manipulation-free and unregulated alternative to the trading app Robinhood.
2. WeBull
One app that has received has seen a lot of traction since the Robinhood manipulation is WeBull. Like Robinhood, they offer commission-free stock trading in a simple and intuitive user interface.
The company also made negative headlines when they briefly suspended GameStop stock trading some time after Robinhood.
However, the CEO promptly justified this, explicitly pointing out that it was not a supposed protection of users or hedge funds – during times of enormous volatility, it simply becomes very costly for the clearing firm to settle a trade. Too costly. And regulations would prevent WeBull from passing costs on to users instead.
By now, trading GameStop, AMC & Co. is possible again without restriction on the platform – you can register for WeBull here.
3. TradeStation
One of the few platforms that didn’t stop trading of the highly volatile stocks like GameStop, AMC & Co. at all is TradeStation.
In a tweet they explain, “At TradeStation, you can buy GME and AMC stock and close positions you own. There are restrictions on short sales and new option positions. Our policy may change with market conditions.”
So while buying and selling is fully functional, short selling and stock options are currently restricted.
Unlike Robinhood or Webull, however, TradeStation has a minimum deposit amount: $2000 US dollars. So it’s a hurdle for the very small investors, but it’s still set relatively low compared to many other platforms.
Click Here to register for TradeStation.
Conclusion
There are definitely platforms that have reacted more accommodatingly to the current speculation around GameStop and other highly volatile stocks.
However, the fundamental problem that centralized platforms regulated by the stock exchange commission can manipulate the market at any time – and in some cases even have no choice – remains.
The only real solution is to bring decentralization to the system – so that there is no single party that can manipulate and self-regulate the market.
Decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and platforms built around them like Cake DeFi thus provide what Robinhood promised but failed to deliver: the democratization of the financial market.