In Spain, banks have allowed to trade on all kinds of assets for ages. Some with low fees. If you wanted to buy a certain asset you could do so in like three clicks.
In the US I know as a fact that some banks like Charles Schwab have also made retail investing accessible for ages…
Robin Hood has “democratized” trading in the sense of aggressively expanding it through marketing, maybe a cool UX (I wouldn’t know), but otherwise I don’t see how it has innovated significantly in the area of retail investing.
Like a sibling commenter is saying it has also popularized day-trading more than anything. The math about day-trading is unequivocal and it may very well be that popularizing this is a net loss for society, or at the very least (yet another?) mechanism for transferring wealth from the middle class to sophisticated elites (I mean, this wouldn’t be a loss if you believe it’s stricly a zero-sum effect, and that wealth is just as well in either set of hands)
To be clear, I may have moral qualms with RH and the popularization of day-trading, but I do believe in free market economics and I think it should exist - I can only hope that in time regular folk become educated about investing and that my transfer theory doesn’t come to fruition.
I’m all open for counterpoints on both my claims that it hasn’t done all that much for democratizing retail investing and that day-trading for the masses may be a bad proposition.