Trading with < $1000 is an utter waste of your time. Interactive Brokers has a $10k lower account limit for your own good.
Individual investors are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to intraday trading.
For everything other than a child's hobby account, intended to teach emotional stability through gains and losses, a <$1,000 stock-trading account is value destroying.
Also, one need not trade a small account intraday. I make small trades, but they are always with a multi-year perspective. Give me limit orders and small commissions, and I am happy.
(N.B. I use a different broker/don't have a first-hand perspective on Robinhood.)
The key to avoiding faffing around with limit orders not filling when you want immediate execution is to place a reasonable limit that accounts for the day's volatility. At other times, I'll place a limit order and let it stand for weeks. When it fills, the counterparty and I are both happy.
I'm rarely using limit orders to shave pennies if I want quick execution. I use them to prevent the unexpected. Under normal market conditions, if the limit is set 10% beyond the expected clearing price, it provides me with free protection against a completely unexpected surprise. Something will have to have gone very wrong with my investment strategies if I'm desperate to buy/sell at any price.
In the long-game case, if I purchase a stock at $0.95 that I think can sell for $0.99, I'll immediately place the limit-order for sale as soon as I've made the purchase. No need to hide my hand -- I'll be happy if you want to buy it at that price (and I might get faster execution by being earlier in the order queue).
you want me to risk > $1000 when I don't know what I'm doing with a real brokerage that I don't know what their benefit is over something like Robinhood because.... ?
I'm willing to loose a couple hundred to learn and understand something vs giving someone I don't know thousands and "trusting" their opinion.
More so - testing the waters myself may not make me as good as someone who does this for a living - but maybe after a few hundred and a few months, at least I have a better understanding of what a real brokerage tells me to buy than to just blindly say take my money and quadruple it.
Brokers should never be telling individual investors what individual stocks to buy, at least not anyone with less than ~$500,000 in assets. If a brokerage is giving you buy/sell lines for individual securities, that's a red flag.
A good investment platform (or adviser) guides you in portfolio management. In encourages long-term strategic thinking over short-term trading highs. The former builds wealth. The latter lines professional traders' pockets.
You can learn the ropes without wasting money.
You can buy and hold, or "Invest", on any platform which, in my opinion, has to meet three minimum requirements: It should offer commission-free trading on a variety of low-cost index funds, it should offer a variety of investment account types (at minimum, taxed accounts, Traditional IRAs, and Roth IRAs), and it should be stable.
Robinhood only meets one of these three criteria. There are dozens of other brokerages out there which do meet all of these criteria: TDAmeritrade, Schwab, Vanguard, and Chase are four great ones.
Robinhood is on the same level as a betting app for sports; so, fine; use it if that's what you want. But do not even mention the word "Invest" in the same sentence as Robinhood; its grossly irresponsible.
I wouldn't advocate anyone trying to build wealth to pick individual stocks, but I do think if someone were investing $1,000 to get their feet wet I'd recommend they put a bit in individual stocks. The financial system is complex and I think it's worth stripping away one level of the complexity for educational purposes. (It's typically also a humbling experience.)
Now I have a much larger account, and I'm trading / investing with a much lower risk profile, because of what I learned on my >$1000 account. I consider that the exact opposite of wasting time.
EDIT: It seems it's completely removed now. https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=4969