Robinhood Investing For Beginners In 2026 ULTIMATE Guide

For almost a decade now, I've been talking about the Robinhood app here on YouTube and over on my blog, investingsimple.com. And in this video, I'm gonna be telling you everything you need to know as a complete beginner who is just getting started. We'll be covering how to open an account, how to place your first trade, as well as some brand new features like their stock screener tool and prediction markets. Now, a lot of time went into making this the best beginner tutorial out there. So if you appreciate that, please drop a like on this video and subscribe. And if there's any specific section that you're looking for, you can use the table of contents down below. Let's get into it. Alrighty guys, so here we are over in my demo Robinhood account. And this is an account that I put together a little bit over a year ago. And as an experiment using their fractional shares feature, I took $1 and put it into every single stock in the S&P 500. So we're gonna take a look at this portfolio's performance here shortly because it's pretty interesting. But for starters, I wanna talk about some of the basics of opening up a Robinhood account. The basic requirements for opening up a Robinhood account include being at least 18 years old, having a valid social security number, a US or Puerto Rico address, and US citizenship or permanent residency or a valid visa. Now, in addition to that, during the account opening process, Robinhood might also ask for proof of government ID, they may also ask you for details about your employer, and even ask for a video selfie for verification. Now, some of that might seem like a red flag, but these are all required steps today to open up any financial account. And the reason why they ask for your social security number is because they have to report your trading activity to the IRS. And as far as details about your address and your employer, well, they have to verify your identity and make sure you are who you say you are. Now, if you don't have a Robinhood account already, you can actually get a completely free stock worth up to $200 when you open up a new account using my affiliate link down below, or by visiting ryanoscribner.com slash Robinhood. And the best part is you actually get to choose your free fractional share from a list of 20 leading American companies. Now, your use of this link does support my channel and make videos like this possible, so thank you very much. But let's now cover some of the basics here on the Robinhood home screen. So if we scroll up to the very top, the first thing you're gonna notice here is a chart showing the performance of your portfolio. And you can change this over different time spans. So over the last month, it's up a little bit under 3%. Year to date, it's up 6.7%. And over the last year, we can see this is up a little bit over 17%. But if you actually hold down on this, you can see what the performance was at different spans of time. And back in April, there was some turmoil in the market. And this portfolio was actually down 14.4%. So it's been a lot more volatile than just the S&P 500, for example. And that's because this is a dollar in every single one of those stocks. So the stock market does have ups and downs. You have to be comfortable with it. But as you can see, it generally goes up over the long run. And this is an example right here of how you will see those ups and downs in the market. And if you're curious about how the portfolio has performed between two spans of time, you can select one section with your left thumb and then do another click on the screen. And this is gonna show you what the performance has been between those two different spans of time there. Now, the next thing you're probably gonna notice here is your buying power. This is going to be any idle cash that you have on the sidelines that you can either invest right away, or you could potentially cash this out to your bank account. We're gonna talk about both of those things here shortly. And then the next section below that is going to be called stocks and ETFs. And this is going to include any investments that you have in your Robinhood portfolio. Now, we're gonna scroll past this for now and revisit it later. And as you can see, there's a massive list here in my case, because I have over 500 different holdings here for this particular portfolio. But what we're gonna do is make our way all the way down here and take a look at some features below that. Starting off with the prediction markets, which is listed right here. This is a brand new feature to the Robinhood app. And if we click on that, this is going to be where you can actually place bets on real world outcomes. Now, I will say you're gonna wanna make your own decision here about whether or not you view this as an investment versus speculation, because a lot of it is tied to things like sporting events, but there's also going to be other categories here, for example, like economics and elections. So for example, there are bets here related to the Fed decisions and where interest rates are headed. But like I said, for the most part, you are going to find a lot of this is related to sporting events, but prediction markets have become extremely popular on Robinhood. So I did want to point this feature out nonetheless. So for example, this right here is a bet on a basketball game that's going to take place in a little under five hours. We can see the odds updating in real time. So this is saying it's 80% odds of Philadelphia winning, 21% odds of Indiana. And you could also get more details here and even place bets on individual players if you want. And the way this would work here is you would purchase a contract for either side here. And then as those odds change, you could either sell or you could wait until the game is over and see how things end up at the final end of the game here. But for now, we're just gonna click here on the back button. We're going to exit prediction markets. In the next section below that is called your realized profit and loss. This is another new section here in the Robinhood app. And this is going to be able to tell you overall if you are making money or losing money with the Robinhood app in terms of your actual realized gains or losses. So for example, in this portfolio, it's actually up 10.44%, which is $13 and 12 cents. And you can scroll down to see what has actually been those realized gains here in the market or realized losses. So this can be a great way to keep track of overall when you're buying and selling investments if you're actually making money or losing money with Robinhood. But there's gonna be another way to track this as well within the portfolio section of the app that I'm going to show you shortly. If we click on the back button now and scroll down, the next section I wanna show you is this cash section. And this is where you can potentially earn an interest on your uninvested cash. So right now I have $1.07, but if we click on this little question mark icon, it mentions that the cash is eligible to earn currently a 3.35% APY. The only thing is this will require a Robinhood Gold subscription, which is their premium service that costs $5 per month. Now, depending on how much extra cash you have, the interest earned could be well more than that $5 per month, but you'd have to do some math there and figure that out yourself. But I just did wanna mention that if you don't have a high yield savings account just yet you could actually use this and take advantage of Robinhood Gold. And there are going to be some other gold perks that we're gonna talk about as we go through the tutorial. So just keep that in the back of your mind for now. So we're gonna click on done. And then the next thing I wanna show you is another new feature here with Robinhood, and that is their stock screener. If we click on the plus icon here, we can see that you can create a screener, which is what we're going to do. And we're going to do a custom screener, but I'm gonna show you some of the prebuilt screeners later on here shortly. So if we click here on continue, we can go ahead and set criteria that we're looking for. So I'm gonna click here on add filter. And let's say, for example, we are looking for high volume, for example. So today's volume, we're going to say over 10 million shares and that's going to show us a list of 196 companies. And then let's add some further criteria. Let's say, for example, we're looking for a market cap here of small cap stocks. So these are gonna be small companies with a very high trading volume. So we'll click here on show 22 items. And this now brings up a list of all of these stocks here that meet that criteria. And if you want, you can save this screener for future use, or you can continue adding different criteria here to narrow things down. You could also look for high dividend stocks. So I'm gonna click on clear all for now, and then select dividend yield and say over 5%. So this is gonna be stocks with dividends over 5%. And then if we want to add another criteria here and say, okay, we're looking for ones that have had a monthly percentage change where the price is up more than 5%, this is going to be dividend stocks over 5% yield where over the last month, the stock has gone up at least 5%. So that's how you can use the stock screener feature. And it can be really helpful if you're just looking to get ideas about potential investments to do further research on. But the next thing we're gonna do is actually look into my investment portfolio here. So we're gonna click here on back. We're going to discard this screener. And now we're gonna scroll all the way up to the top, just like we were before. And what we're going to do this time is actually click on this stocks and ETFs section. And now this brings us into our actual Robinhood portfolio. So the chart here at the very top is going to be the same as what we looked at before on the home screen. But the first thing I wanna show you here under the holding section is how many stocks I own. And in this case, it is 503. Now, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that you go out and buy 500 plus stocks. This was just for demo purposes, but it made for a pretty interesting experiment here because as you can see, some of these stocks are up massively. We are gonna take a look at SanDisk Corporation, the top gainer in this portfolio shortly. But the first thing I wanna show you is if you actually click on the percentage here, you can change the display data to show different things. So right now it's showing total percentage change, but we could also take a look at today's return in terms of the dollar amount. We could also look at the total equity in this. And these were all $1 investments. So that's what these have turned into a little bit over one year. But that's how you would change the display data here in the Robinhood app. But for now, we're just gonna change this back over to what it was, which is the total percentage change. And now let's go ahead and click into SanDisk and take a look at the top performer in this investment portfolio. Now, the first thing you might want to know about in the top right here are two simple things. The little bell icon here is where you can create alerts. So if you wanted to set price alerts for a particular stock or ETF, you can do that. Now, you would need to enable Robinhood notifications for that, which I have turned off, but that is one thing you might be interested in. And then to the right of that, you can click on the plus icon and add SanDisk to a list or watch list. So if you have stocks or ETFs you want to keep track of in one particular location, you can add those to a list, and then that would be visible on your homepage. Now, here's another relatively new feature to Robinhood, and that is their advanced charting. So by default, we have a basic line chart, which is very similar to the portfolio tracking chart that we looked at earlier. But if we click on this button here that says advanced, this is going to bring us over to the advanced charting features, which is going to be for technical analysis and those who are doing more active trading strategies. One of the criticisms of Robinhood over the years is that the charting was very basic and was not advanced. So this was their response here, was adding in advanced charting features right within the app. So you can change the timeframe just like we were before and look at different spans of time. So let's take a look at the one month chart, and then we're going to change these technical indicators. So if we click on the squiggly F here, we can see it's showing a simple moving average and the RSI, relative strength index. So you could either turn these off if you wanted, or we can click on the plus icon and see all of these different technical indicators that are built right into the Robinhood app. So we're just going to add an SMA, a simple moving average that's now been added to the chart. So if I click here on done, we can see the SMA is showing a 50 day simple moving average and it might be difficult to see from this view. Oh, it's actually because it's below our view right now. But if I click on the last year, we can see the SMA is that purple line indicated there. So if you are looking for advanced charting features, they are available right here within Robinhood. And then you would just click on the X and it brings us back to the simple line chart we were looking at before. Now, if we change this back to the trading day, we can see that this stock is down about 6.5%, which is a pretty big move, but this is a tech stock and you can expect to have much bigger swings there. But if we're wondering why that's the case, below that we can see top news and it mentions that SanDisk slides on Citron short announcement. So there's a big short seller betting against this stock and that's why it has dropped so much today. Below that, we're gonna see details about your position. So in this case, we can see that I'm up 1,358% on this, but again, I only invested $1. And it's also a little bit complicated here because this stock was actually split off from I believe it was Western Digital. So that's why it's not as high of a percentage here because the acquisition cost was a little bit different. So I'm not sure exactly how that's calculated, but I just wanted to mention that. And then if we scroll down further, we can get information about SanDisk Corporation. If you want to get a company profile, you can click here on show more. But what I wanna show you now is the bid and ask price for the stock. Now, this is going to be the real time buying and selling happening at the exchange. But what a lot of people don't realize is that you have level two market data now built right into the Robinhood app. And that means if you click on this, it's actually gonna show you the full order book here at the exchange. And these are the real time orders taking place. It shows the price and the size of those orders. Now, most casual users are not going to need this information, but I just wanted to show it to you because a lot of people don't realize how much is now built into the Robinhood app that are actually more advanced features. But for now, we're just gonna click on the back button and the next tab below that is going to be news. So this is going to be any news surrounding the stock. And for example, at the top, it mentions the short seller article. If you click into this, it's going to open the article right within the Robinhood app. So that's helpful because you don't need to open up a separate browser tab or anything like that. And you can see the details here about this particular news article. And then when you're all set, you can click on the X and return back to this main screen. Now, if we keep on scrolling down, the next section here is going to show analyst ratings. These are basically the professional stock pickers out there and what they think about this particular investment. So in this case, 74% are viewing this as a buy and 26% view this as a hold. And that is among 23 analyst ratings. Now you can also get a thesis here on the stock, a bullish and a bearish thesis. So if you click on show more, this is a basically publication from Morningstar. And this is why bulls are essentially thinking the stock could go higher. You can read that summary or click on dismiss. And if you want to hear about the bearish case or why the stock might not continue to go up and might potentially go down, you can click on show more and get the bearish thesis on the stock. For now, we're gonna click here on dismiss. In the next section below that is going to show us the short interest or people who are actually betting against the stock. Now, short selling is rather complicated and it's above and beyond the scope of this video, but you can just think of this as downward pressure potentially on the stock. And this shows us the volume of short interest and the percentage of the float or the total number of shares available. So right now it's somewhere between five to 5 1⁄2%, nothing too crazy, but there is some short volume present here on the stock. And we saw what the article there that there is a new short seller impacting the share price today. Below that is the trading trends section of the app. And this is showing us what is happening among Robinhood users, hedge funds and insiders within the company. So looking at the insider activity, it's pretty equal here between buying and selling volume. Looking at the hedge funds in quarter three, there was definitely more selling than there was buying. And this is going to be delayed because it's based on quarterly reporting that comes out after the fact. And among Robinhood users, they're definitely selling here. Over the last couple of trading days, we can see that Robinhood users are definitely taking their money out of this particular stock. So this can be helpful here if you're just looking to get a gauge on if people are buying or selling, but you don't wanna just follow the herd here because that's typically how you're going to lose money in the stock market. Now below that, we can see there are professional research reports. These are going to be requiring Robinhood Gold. So if you do subscribe to their premium service, one of the other benefits you'll get here is access to professional analyst reports from Morningstar. But anybody with the basic version of the app can get these simple summaries. So that is pretty cool. And below that, we can see a chart representing the company's earnings history. So we can see what the expected earnings per share were or the estimated versus the actual. And we can see that over the last couple of quarters, they have been beating earnings expectations, which is why the share price has gone up so much over the last couple of months and last year, et cetera. Now below that, we can see related lists, which are going to be companies that are similar. So for example, hardware stocks or California stocks. And this is also a stock that's on the 24-hour market. This is a rather unique feature here on Robinhood. And it basically means that any of these stocks and ETFs on this list are available for trading 24 hours a day from Sunday, 8 p.m. Eastern time to Friday, 8 p.m. Eastern time. So if you wanted to trade stocks around the clock virtually, this is a list of ones that you can on Robinhood. And then one more thing I wanna show you in this portfolio section, if we click on the back button and then scroll all the way down below all of these 500 plus stocks and ETFs that I own, there is going to be a history section. And if we click on the show more button, this is going to show all of the history of this account. So all of these little one cent dividends are actually going back into the stock that issued them. But this is where you would see dividend activity with your portfolio, as well as any buy and sells that you initiate. They're gonna show up here under that history section. But now I wanna talk about the account types available through Robinhood. And real quick, if you've gotten any value out of this video so far guys, make sure you drop a like and subscribe if you haven't already. At the very top here, we can see the investing account is selected. And this is the standard account type here with Robinhood. It is a taxable brokerage account. And this is how most people get started with the Robinhood app. If we click on the next account over, this brings us to the retirement accounts section of the Robinhood app. And these have become very popular here as well. As far as retirement accounts go, Robinhood offers both traditional and Roth IRAs. But the biggest benefit to these is the IRA match that they offer. And it's pretty much a feature that you're not going to find among a lot of the old school brokerage accounts. But newer age investing platforms often offer this as an additional perk here to incentivize people to open up retirement accounts with them. So in this case here, the IRA match is going to be a flat 1% for all users, regardless of whether or not you have Robinhood Gold. But if you do have Robinhood Gold, they boost that up to a 3% IRA match. And this doesn't count towards your total contributions for the year, because there are contribution limits for traditional and Roth IRAs. This is actually treated as interest income. So this is going to be above and beyond what you can contribute through the IRS rules. Now, in addition to the IRA match, you can also get a 1% match on IRA transfers, as well as old 401ks that you roll over. So if you do have a old 401k from a previous employer or an IRA that you want to move over to Robinhood, you can basically get a 1% bonus on the entire value of the account that you transfer over. So that's a pretty good incentive as well. And if you don't have a retirement account just yet, you might want to look into this, especially the Roth IRA, as this can allow for tax-free growth of your portfolio in terms of both the dividends earned and the capital gains. If we click on the next tab over, the next account type here with Robinhood is the Robinhood Gold card. And this is a 3% cash back card that essentially earns this on any spending category. Now it's currently on a wait list, so you'd have to basically just reserve your spot. So there's no annual fees, no foreign transaction fees, and as mentioned, 3% cash back on all spending categories. So if you did want to jump on that wait list, you can do that here. One thing to be aware of though, as the name would suggest, this does require you to have a Robinhood Gold subscription. Next over, we have joint accounts. So if you're looking to invest with your significant other in a combined account, Robinhood does offer joint accounts, which is very useful. And then finally, this is another new feature here called Robinhood Strategies, which is essentially professionally managed portfolios similar to a robo-advisor. Now Robinhood does like to point out that this is more advanced than your run-of-the-mill robo-advisor as they have tax strategies like tax loss harvesting and a higher level of portfolio control. But the main thing to be aware of here is the asset management fees and how this works for regular users and gold users. So without Robinhood Gold, this is going to be a flat 0.25% annual asset management fee and that's pretty reasonable compared to what you might pay for other types of money management. But if you do have Robinhood Gold, it's the same 0.25% up to $100,000, but any dollar amount beyond $100,000 is essentially fee free. And that means the more that you potentially invest, the lower your asset management fee becomes across the entire portfolio. Okay, guys, so the next part of the app I wanna show you is going to be Robinhood Crypto. And this is more than just an account type. This is actually a completely different section of the app. You're gonna access it by clicking on the C icon here at the bottom to the right of the chart. And this brings you over to the Robinhood Crypto section. So if we scroll down here, the first thing you'll notice here is the staking section. So if you do want to participate in staking, they currently support that for three different tokens. That's going to be Solana, Cardano, and Ethereum. And then below that, we're gonna see a top five daily movers section. That's exactly what the name suggests here. That's gonna be the most active cryptocurrencies that are currently supported on Robinhood. So right now, it's a pretty bearish day. We can see it's pretty much drops across the board. And then below that, you can see both the tradable and non-tradable cryptocurrencies. Starting off with the tradable section, this is going to be assets you can actually buy and sell on Robinhood. And if we click here on the show all button, it shows there are 60 items on this list. So Robinhood supports 60 cryptocurrencies right now for trading. And if we actually click on one here, like Bitcoin, I wanna show you a couple of things real quick here. For starters, you can access advanced charting as well for cryptocurrencies. So if you wanted to use this for an advanced crypto trading platform, you can do that as well. And the other thing I wanna show you here, if you scroll down, is that you can in fact send and receive cryptocurrency using Robinhood. So if you wanted to buy crypto through the app and then send it over to a self-custody wallet or a hardware wallet for cold storage, that is definitely an option here. And Robinhood actually has their own self-custody wallet that you could look into if you want to stay within the Robinhood ecosystem. And then if we click here on the trade button and then select buy, you can also buy cryptocurrencies in $1 increments, just like their fractional shares. So that's really helpful to lower the barriers to entry. And one thing I wanna mention as well is that Robinhood has some of the lowest fees out there when it comes to crypto investing. They have a comparison tool on their website that I'll toss up on screen. I'll also link down below. But basically you're going to find the fees are often lowest here compared to other options out there. And that can be great to keep in mind if you are looking to purchase cryptocurrencies and pay the lowest possible price for them. So we're gonna click on the back button for now and then navigate over to the non-tradable cryptocurrencies and click on see all. And this list has over 150 different items. So these are not assets that you can buy and sell on Robinhood, but you can keep track of the price here. So if you wanted to use this for price tracking reasons and things like that, that's what this section here is for in the Robinhood app. And then if we go back to the main page and scroll down, any holdings that you have would be listed here. And then there's a learn about crypto section here where you can click on different modules here for learnings about either trading on Robinhood crypto or learning about Bitcoin, US dollar coin, et cetera. There's also going to be a news section below that and then a history section here that's gonna show you any of your past transactions specifically related to Robinhood crypto. So that's it for the crypto section of the Robinhood app. The very next tab here at the bottom with the search icon is going to be where you can get tabs on what's going on with the overall market and different things like that. So at the very top here, we can see the major indices are listed like the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ 100. If we actually click on that, we can see a chart here for the S&P 500. But what we're gonna do for now is click on back and look at a few other things here. One of my favorite features, which is also relatively new is if you click here on macro, this is going to show you individual sectors and their performance, as well as a heat map, which is gonna show you what are the top performers of that particular sector. So looking at technology, for example, we can see that Apple is up big today, as well as TSM. I think that's Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, but don't quote me on that, might be something different. And then if you scroll through here, you can look at different sectors like finance, consumer goods, media, healthcare. So this can be a great way to keep tabs on the overall market, or if you have a lot of exposure to one particular sector or segment of the economy, you can come in here and utilize that heat map feature. The crypto tab is gonna show a lot of the same information from before, and sports is just gonna bring you back over to prediction markets. So we're just gonna navigate back over to the now section once again. And then below that, the next thing you're gonna notice here is top movers, similar to with cryptocurrencies, you can get a list of the top movers in the market. So for example, today, AMD is up over 9%, so that's a big win there for AMD shareholders. And you can see what stocks are having the biggest moves up or down today, and there's SanDisk Corporation, the stock we looked at earlier on, as one of the top movers in the downward direction. Now, if you're looking for alternative investments outside of traditional stocks and ETFs, Robinhood does offer IPO access, where you can get shares of newly listed companies before they go public. So you can look into that on your own, but in general, IPO investing is not something that's typically recommended for beginners, because you need to know a lot about valuing companies. And oftentimes, these IPOs will usually go down after listing, so it's not necessarily the best investment in most cases. And a newly added investment here as well is their Robinhood Ventures Fund, which is basically a fund that's investing in private companies. If you wanted to explore private equity, they do have a fund investment there for that, but you'd wanna look into the risks and things associated with that on your own. But I did want to make you aware of that, as that is a newer feature here on Robinhood. And then below that is CryptoMovers, which is going to be very similar to what we saw earlier on. We can also see a list of companies that are reporting earnings in terms of their expectations. So these companies here beat expectations, it shows what the EPS was expected to be, and then the share performance on the left. So that can be helpful if you're looking to keep track of companies that are reporting earnings and the price action surrounding that. Below that are more stock screeners. Now, what's cool about this is these aren't custom screeners, these are pre-built screeners. So for example, we can see daily movers, whether it's ones that are going up or down, upcoming earnings, analyst picks, high volatility, high options volume, high dividend yield. And you could click into any one of these and see what is listed there. So all of these here are analyst picks, stocks that the analysts expect will do well. We're gonna click on back for now and continue scrolling. Next below that, we have trending lists. This is just going to be lists of particular stocks and ETFs. So we talked about IPOs, for example, looking at IPO access. This is gonna show us anything that is in flight or currently available. And if we click here on launched, these are companies that already went live. And you can see here that, again, the performance isn't always very good. Oftentimes they go down after IPO. For example, maybe Medline is a rare case, that one went up, but the majority of these went down after going public. And that is your typical experience when investing in IPOs. So just keep that in the back of your mind. And then we're just gonna click on back and keep on scrolling down. The market news section is gonna show you the biggest news articles in the market today. There's also videos built right in, which is really helpful. It's kind of a multimedia approach here to this feed. So this is a great place to just keep tabs on the overall market, stay up to date on news, see what the big movers are in the market, and things like that. And then you can also click into the search box and type in the name of a company, the symbol and things like that. But we're actually going to get to that a little bit later on, because now what we're going to do is talk about bank transfers and how you would actually get money over to your Robinhood account to invest with. So let's start out by talking about how to deposit money into your Robinhood account. From the home screen here, we're gonna click on buying power. And then we're gonna click on this deposit funds button at the bottom. And at this point, I do have to stop the screen recording and just take screenshots, because I'm not allowed to do screen recording for privacy reasons. On the next screen here, you're gonna input the dollar amount that you're looking to deposit. In this case, we're going to make a $10 deposit. So we've typed that in, and then we're going to click on the black continue button. And on this screen, we're going to choose the from and to account. Now I already have my bank account linked here, but if you don't have an account linked what you're going to do is select the from section with the up and down arrows. And on this screen, you have the ability to add a new bank account. So if I actually click here on add account, this brings us to a screen where you can choose the account type, and you can either link a debit card or a bank account to Robinhood. And I would honestly recommend just doing a traditional bank account in my opinion. The only difference here with debit cards is it can allow for instant transfers. But most of the time, if you're able to link your bank account via Plaid immediately, you'll also be able to get access to instant deposits. So that's something to keep in mind here as well. If you click on bank account transfer, it's going to bring you over to Plaid. And this is where you can go ahead and enter the login details for a financial institution. And it's going to securely link your bank account immediately. Now that information is not shared with Robinhood. And you can basically type in any of the financial accounts into that search bar and see if this is supported. If not, there are options to manually link your bank account using your account and routing number and verifying two small deposits. The only downside to that is that isn't going to be instant. But that's how you would link a bank account with Robinhood. Since I already have mine linked, we don't have to do that. Instead, we're just going to click on this deposit $10 button to finish off our deposit. Now the next screen here shows us that the deposit was initiated. And if we click on the continue button, it now shows us that instant deposit is available. So that's one of the benefits to using Robinhood is that when you make a deposit within a certain dollar amount, they make that deposit available immediately to invest before the funds hit your Robinhood account. But you do want to make sure that you maintain that balance in your bank account, because if they go to take that money out and it's not there, that can result in restrictions to your Robinhood account. So now we can see my buying power has increased to $11.06. So we have successfully made that $10 deposit. And now before we actually make an investment here, I wanna quickly cover the other side of things, which would be how to cash out and withdraw money from your Robinhood account. For that, you're gonna click on the person icon in the bottom right, followed by the three lines in the top left. And then you're gonna go to the transfer section of the app. And once again, I do have to disable the screen recording and take screenshots here. On this screen here, you have the option to either deposit, withdraw or transfer. We're gonna click on the withdraw icon. And then you have this next screen where you can enter the dollar amount that you're looking to cash out. In my case, I have $1.06 available. And real quick, I wanna talk about availability of funds to withdraw, because if you sell off a stock, you won't be able to take that money over to your bank account immediately. And here's why. Brokerage accounts have something called T plus one settlement. And that basically means that when you sell a stock or ETF, you need to wait one trading day before this becomes withdrawable cash. And it's basically the amount of time it takes for that transaction to settle and that money to come back over to your brokerage account. So for example, if you sold a stock or ETF on a Monday, you'd be able to withdraw or cash that money out to your bank account on that Tuesday. So after you input the dollar amount you're looking to withdraw, you'd click here on the continue button. And then you have a dropdown here where you choose the account you're looking to transfer that over to. And if you have multiple accounts linked, you will see that here. And then you have the option to choose between a standard or instant transfer. Now a standard transfer is going to be free and it takes four to five days. That's what I would recommend in most cases. And depending on your bank, it usually doesn't even take that four to five days. The instant transfer does come with fees that are variable. And honestly, unless you really need that money immediately, I just don't think it's wise to pay fees for no reason. But just be aware of the fact that if you do use instant transfer, you are going to pay fees to Robinhood in the process. Okay guys, so now that we're out of the transfer section of the app, I can now record my screen again. And the next thing I wanna show you is how to actually make an investment using the Robinhood app. So what we're gonna do is click on the search icon here from before. And this time we're actually going to click into the search bar, and we're going to type in the symbol for the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, which is VOO. And then we're gonna click here on this plus icon to bring us to the main page for this. Now this is going to be a diversified investment into an ETF or exchange traded fund. And what this is going to do is spread your money out across the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the US. So if we scroll down, we're gonna get a better idea of what this means here because it shows us both the sectors and the top 10 holdings. Let's start with the top 10 holdings. So when you invest in the S&P 500, we can see that about 38% of your money goes into these 10 companies right here because this is a market value weighted index. And that means that a larger a company is, the more of the money gets allocated there in terms of the total fund. So for every dollar you put into VOO, about 7.8 cents of that goes into Nvidia, which is pretty crazy. But because of how big they've become, that's just how it works out. And a lot of your money does go into big tech like Microsoft, Alphabet, Broadcom, Meta platforms, et cetera. But that's just the economy now is driven by technology. So that's where most of the weight is in this index. And then if we click here on sectors, we can see that's represented here as well. 34% of all of the money flows into tech. And the next biggest section is financial services followed by communication services, consumer cyclical and so forth. But this can be super helpful here just to see where your money is going when you're making fund investments through Robinhood. Now, if you are looking to learn more about investing in the S&P 500, I do have a full video on that topic. I'll put a card in the corner as well as a link down below for later. If we scroll down further, we can see the stats or statistics section. This mentions the expense ratio here for this, which is 0.03%. Vanguard is known for having some of the lowest expenses in the investment industry. So that's why they are often recommended. But one more thing I wanna show you here below the news, below short interest, all the way here at the bottom is going to be the average annual return. So if you're looking to see what the performance has been for different fund investments on Robinhood, you can take a look at that right here. Now, before we get into actually placing a trade here for buying shares of VOO, I wanna quickly show you where you would locate stock options in the Robinhood app. Now, these aren't necessarily a beginner-friendly investment, but I just wanted to give you a full tour here so you were aware. If we click on the trade button at the very top, you can see trade options. So we're gonna go ahead and select that. And this brings us into the options trading section of Robinhood. But what we're gonna do instead is just select one of these expiration dates at the top. So we'll go with the June 18th expiration. And this brings us to the options chain section of the Robinhood app. So on the left, you can choose whether or not you are looking to buy or sell. And on the right, you can see call or put options. To explain at a very basic level, a call option is going to be a bullish bet, meaning that you think the price is going to go higher and you would make money if the underlying asset increased in value. And then a put option is a bearish bet where you're making money if the asset declines in value. Now, I have a full tutorial on Robinhood options I'll put in the corner and also down below if you want to learn more. But that's just the basics in how you would locate this in the Robinhood app. So if we're looking at a call option, for example, let's just click on the $635 call. This brings up more details about the option contract. And one thing to be aware of with options is that you always have to take that option premium and multiply it by 100 because it's going to be 100 underlying shares for each contract. So if we actually click here on this buy button, we can see the current option premium is 2630, but the estimated cost would be 100 times that or 2,630. So it can actually take a bit more money than you might expect to get into options trading. And that's just something else to keep in mind. But again, options are not generally recommended for beginners, but at least now you know where you would locate those in the Robinhood app. And you can check out my full video there to learn more about options trading in general. But now let's go through the steps here of investing in this Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. We're gonna click here on the trade button and then select buy. And by default, it's going to bring us to this screen here where we can make a fractional share investment. So Robinhood does allow you to buy fractional shares in $1 increments. It's a huge benefit because it means you don't need to have enough money to buy one whole share. If I click here in the top right where it says dollars and change this over to buying in shares, we can see that buying one whole share would require $631 and some change. So that's why fractional shares are extremely helpful because otherwise you would need to have that amount of money just to buy one whole share. And a lot of beginners might not have that much to invest upfront. But for now, we're gonna change it back over to investing in dollars. And that's going to allow us to put as little as a dollar into the S&P 500 if we want to. But before we make that investment, I wanna show you one more thing here under this dropdown. And that is the recurring investment section. If we click on this under conditional orders, you can actually do automated investments into any particular asset on Robinhood. It could be a stock, a crypto, or an ETF. So if you wanted to invest on a recurring schedule, you could invest every market day, every week, every two weeks, or every month. So for example, if you wanted to put money into the S&P 500 every single week, you can fully automate that here with Robinhood. You would just click here on continue, and then put in the amount that you want to invest on a weekly schedule. And then it's gonna take care of that for you in the background. But for now, we're just gonna click on back, and we're just going to do a regular market order, buying in dollars. And that means it's going to fill at the best available price right now. So we're going to put this $10 into this, which is gonna be 0.01583 shares. And then when everything looks good here, we can swipe up, and that's going to submit the order. And just like that, we invested $10 into the 500 largest publicly traded US companies. If we click here on done, and then click on cancel, it's gonna bring us back to the main profile page here for that. And then if we scroll up, now we're going to see a section that shows us the performance of this investment. So now we see your position is listed. We have an average cost of 631.71. And this is where you'll be able to keep track of whether or not you are making money or losing money with this investment. But you don't wanna keep track of things on a second to second basis. It's gonna change around like crazy. For example, we were just down slightly and then back to break even. Now we're up slightly. So the market is moving around all the time. So that's how you would buy a stock or ETF using Robinhood. But now what I'm gonna do is turn around and sell this investment that we just made. Now you wouldn't wanna do this on your own because there'd really be no point to buy and sell that quickly. But just for demo purposes, I wanted to show you both sides of the transaction. So we're gonna click on the trade button again. And this time, since we already own the asset, we have the option here to sell. And this is gonna bring us to the page here like we saw before. You can either enter a dollar amount that you're looking to sell, or you can click on the sell all button, which is what we're looking to do. And in this case, the value really didn't change. So we're gonna get our $10 back out of it. But that's a rare case because normally there would be some price fluctuation here. And then just like before, we're going to swipe up. And now we have sold that fractional share investment. So if I click here on done, and then scroll down, we're gonna see, it doesn't list a position here anymore because we have sold it off. And if we click back on the chart icon here in the bottom left, it doesn't show up in the buying power immediately. But if you click on this, it's going to show unsettled funds of $10. So this is that T plus one settlement we were just talking about where it's going to take one trading day before those funds are available to either invest elsewhere or cash out to your bank account. But you will see it listed here under your buying power just so you know that it is being accounted for somewhere. The next thing I wanna cover here are just some basic beginner tips here, or settings that you might want to know about inside the Robinhood app. And the very first one is going to be how to contact customer support. So if you end up at a point where you're stuck or you have a question, you can reach out to support and that is super helpful. You would click on the person icon in the bottom right, followed by the three lines in the top left. And then at the top, you can see Robinhood support and you can reach out to them 24 seven and they offer chat based support. So for starters, you can go ahead into the help center and just look for a article to help you with a question. For example, let's say you wanna learn about dividend reinvestment. We can see that populates right there. And then if we click on the dropdown, it's gonna give us instructions on how to enable dividend reinvestment. So the help section can be good for simple questions, but if you have something that you're not able to find the answer to, you can click on done and then click on contact support. And then you can start a Robinhood support chat here. And like I said, they offer 24 seven support. It's a big perk here to Robinhood. And you can just type in any questions that you have and chat with the support team about whatever it is you're looking to solve or learn about. But for now, we're just gonna click on end chat because we don't really need customer support right now. And I'm gonna click on the back button. And the next thing I wanna show you is how to locate your tax documents. So if we scroll down here, we're going to see a tax center. And this is going to show you a tax timeline. So the 1099s have already been released. We can see my form is listed right here. And then it also mentions the filing deadline just to be aware of. And you're only going to have a taxable event with your Robinhood account if you earn dividends or actually sell an investment. If you just have paper gains or losses, that's not going to be something that is taxable. It's only when you actually sell and recognize those gains or losses that those are going to be recorded. And one thing to be aware of is if you use a tax prep software, oftentimes you can directly import this over using your Robinhood logins. So it makes it really easy and you don't even have to input data off of a tax form if you're using popular tax software like TurboTax, for example. And then one more thing you might want to be aware of is how to set a beneficiary. And that's going to be here in the settings. You can click on beneficiaries and then you can add up to 10 beneficiaries and change this at any point in time just to make sure that if anything happens to you, your Robinhood account goes to whoever you want to have access to your funds at that point in time. There you have it, guys. That's a full rundown on getting started with the Robinhood app. If you made it to the end of the video, make sure you drop a like and subscribe if you haven't already, and be sure to give yourself a pat on the back for getting started with the investing journey. If you have any questions about this tutorial or anything related to the Robinhood app, please leave me a comment down below and I will do my best to personally answer each question in the comments. If you're looking to learn more about Robinhood, check out my next video here on the Robinhood Legend desktop platform, which is a full-blown trading workstation for advanced strategies. This is generally for more advanced users following active trading strategies, but you could check it out yourself if you want to learn more about what you might explore down the line with Robinhood. I'll see you there.