Robinhood Investing for Beginners 2026 Step By Step Guide

Listen, in today's video, I'm going to be giving you a complete 100% beginner's guide to using Robinhood investing for 2026. Whether you're somebody who's just getting started, you don't know how to set up your account. You're not sure how to link your bank account, get money into the application, or maybe even make your first investments. Or you're somebody who's a little bit more experienced that wants to be brushed up on what the app has to offer. Well, this video is going to have everything for you. The best part is it's going to be timestamped in the description of this video, and you're going to be able to get the information that you need just by clicking around. So if you're not interested in watching the whole breakdown, you can just jump around to the sections that apply to you. And without further ado, I mean, let's just jump right in. So listen, before you even start investing any real money, I want to talk about something very important that most people worry about getting started, and that is safety. Now, as in, is my money actually protected in Robinhood investing? So here's the simple version, okay? When you buy stocks and ETFs on Robinhood, those investments are protected by something called SIPC insurance. Now, SIPC doesn't protect you from the market fluctuations, right? Like the stock market goes up or the stock market goes down, but it does protect you if the brokerage, aka Robinhood itself, were to fail, right? And so in that scenario, SIPC covers up to $500,000 in total securities, meaning those different investments in your account, including up to $250,000 in cash that's sitting uninvested in your account. Okay, again, this does not guarantee you against losing money from investing, but if stocks drop, that's just the market, right? The actual ownership of your shares is protected, okay? Now, here are a few things that are not covered. Crypto, options collateral, and anything that isn't a traditional stock or ETF does not fall under SIPC. Everything that we discuss aside from crypto in this video is going to fall under SIPC, and you are completely covered with it. So crypto has its own separate custodial protections, but it's not the same type of insurance, okay? On top of that, Robinhood uses industry standard security measures, things like two-factor authentication, device verification, biometric logging, and encryption to protect your account from any unauthorized access. Now, if you want to add an extra layer of protection, turn on two-factor authentication and set up a unique password, those two steps alone would protect most issues that would arise, okay? So the quick summary is your securities are protected if the brokerage fails, and your account has multiple layers of security to keep people out. And the only real risk that you take on, well, it's the normal market risk that comes with investing in general. It doesn't matter where you're investing, you're going to hit that risk, okay? And that's the part that no platform can protect you from. So listen, my favorite part about these tutorials is when I can actually help you, and this is something that definitely financially benefits you in this situation, and that is just signing up using the link in the description of this video. So basically, you're going to be taken, you can use my link, and it gives you anywhere from a $500 to $200 worth of a stock. Now, you'll be taken to a screen that looks just like this, where you can click claim your gift stock now. And in full transparency, it does also benefit my channel, it just helps me out when you sign up, because I do as well get a stock valued in that $500 to $200 range. But if you don't use my code, you can use anybody you know that uses the app, a friend, and you can start sharing your own. So you can even comment in the description, or sorry, comment section of this video, what yours is, and maybe somebody will use it here in the future. So definitely take advantage of that. Now, this is going to kick off the signup process, and let me just walk through some common questions that I get there. So it's actually probably easiest for me just to walk through the signup process altogether. So you can see, I'm going to enter my email address here, click on continue, and then it takes me to actually go and download the application. Now, once you go and download the application, I believe it's there that it's going to ask you the more personal questions that you get. Oh, and by the way, this is on most major app stores, so you can get this on the Google Play Store, iPhone, like whatever other stores that are out there in terms of the phone stuff that I'm probably not familiar with. Robinhood should exist across the board. Now, the other thing is that this is limited to certain regions, so it might not be available in your country. You just want to double check that just to make sure. But here in the US, it's available everywhere. Okay, so for the first screen, again, it just asks for your email address. I'm going to go ahead and click continue here, and you can choose a password for it as well. And you can see it asks for what is your legal name. Now, this is going to start asking questions that you might feel a little bit uncomfortable with, but just know that this is required by every single brokerage out there for them to legally open your account. You're going to have to do this no matter where you decide to invest your money. So whether it is Robinhood Investing, or maybe you're looking at opening a Fidelity account, Charles Schwab, it really doesn't matter. This information is required. And actually, you can see that how they write it here. We're required by law to collect certain information that helps us know who you are when you log into Robinhood. It's all about keeping your account safe. And that is the goal, yes, because you want to make sure that this money is tied to you. You've worked extremely hard for your money. You're probably trying to get more money through investing. And so they want this account tied to you specifically. The other thing is there are tax implications to investing. Don't get overwhelmed by it. We'll talk about that in a minute. But let me just click on continue here, and then they're going to ask for your phone number. So you can put your phone number in. They'll text you a verification code. You'll put it back into here, and then that's going to help spark your account. You can then set up your Touch ID or your Face ID, and you can continue moving forward. Okay, now, because I already have an account open with Robinhood Investing, I can't get much further than this because I can't double verify my number with multiple accounts and things like that. But I wanted to cover some things that I think are really important that people always ask on these videos. So the first things first is the biggest red flag that you get when opening these accounts. People get really protective over their social security number, and I completely get it. I mean, I remember when I first signed up, I was hesitating to do the same, but just know that no matter where you sign up, again, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, like any of the brokerages that you open, Robinhood, you are going to need to put your social security number. The reason being is one, they need to tie this account specifically to you. Worked extremely hard for your money, and they want to link it to you and just know that you're in good hands. The second reason why is, unfortunately, you do have to pay taxes when it comes to your investing. Once you start making a lot of money, right? Once you start making money investing in general and taxes, there is stuff that gets involved. Now, don't get overwhelmed by that because Robinhood makes it extremely easy to file, but you'd have to pay those taxes no matter where you are opening your account. So just know that this is completely normal. I've had my social security number in there for a very long time. Obviously, do your research with where you're putting that stuff, but I fully trust it, and I wouldn't worry too much about it because you're going to need to be putting it into any account that you try and open that you're going to be making investments in. Okay, so let's say you've submitted all your information. You're feeling pretty good. You've entered your social security number, address, all the personal stuff that feels wrong, but is necessary for this stuff. You put that all in, you're looking good. Okay, how long does it take to actually be verified? Now, for me, I was verified within minutes of submitting my application. I've heard of cases that it takes between one to three days more realistically. So it's going to be interesting to see how long it might take for you. Now, don't worry if you didn't get instant approval to this. It is probably coming your way. They're just going to double check the details and make sure everything looks straight. So I wouldn't stress out too much about it. Okay, so when you first open the application after being approved, you're going to be taken to a screen that looks like this. You're going to have $0 populated. It's all going to look brand new and fresh compared to me where there's, well, 40,000 and different investments that have been made. I'm going to walk through all of this step-by-step, but I think first and most importantly, is again, we want to make sure your account is secure as possible. Especially with somebody like me who talks about all the values and everything I'm doing online, I want to make sure that nobody else can get access to my account. It's very important. So the first thing you're going to want to do is hit the little guy icon in the bottom right. And then you're going to want to click on the little hamburger menu icon in the top left. Once you do that, you can scroll down and you can go into security and privacy. Once you're in security and privacy, I highly recommend creating a passkey and then make sure, you know, you've just created your password so you don't really need to change it yet or anything like that. But you have this device security set up here. I use my face ID and anytime I close Robinhood and then reopen it, it requires it immediately. Super fast for me, because all I do is look at my camera. But if anybody got access to my phone that I didn't want, well, they wouldn't then be able to go into my investment accounts, see all my investments, maybe sell an investment and, you know, worst case scenario, transfer any of it out. You just want to make sure that this is all locked down. And I would do this as step one after you open your account, just to feel really confident about it. Okay, so first let's talk about the home screen that you get here. And it's pretty straightforward. At the very top, you can see the different accounts that you have open within Robinhood. Now I've got multiple accounts. You might just have a couple here, or you might even just have one. Now we're going to be talking about the different accounts, what they mean here in a second, but let's just talk about the overall layout here. Now at the very top, you have this chart. You can look at your performance of your investments by clicking on the little icons down here. So you've got one day. You can see how it performed over the last day. For me, down $146 or 0.38%, 36%. That's what it looks like. You've got the one week, one month, three months, all the same information, how your performance is year to date, your one year, and then you have your all time as well. So it's all just information that you can be breaking down and looking at how your stocks are performing over time. And it's real time. So it updates. You can see right now, the values are changing because well, the actual stock values on the stock market are changing. So all of this is real time. Okay. Buying power you see is the next tab down here. If I click on that, that's actually how much money I have in here that is available for me to start investing with. So that's my buying power. And that's how you can also deposit funds, which we'll talk about how to link up your bank account and everything in a second. Now you also have this sort of information section right here that may or may not be populated. It usually gives you some tips for your Robinhood account or different investments that you're holding and some news that's going on. I'm going to exit out and you can see I'm all caught up here. Okay. Then you have this crypto section. Now crypto is another portion of Robinhood investing. Now, if you're opening this account, you're probably looking to invest in the stock market, but there is some crypto that you can invest into. And you can see that I actually hold some Bitcoin in this account for me. We'll talk about that once we get to that account type. And then underneath the crypto, you can see stocks and ETFs. Now these are all the different stocks, the investments that I have into this particular portfolio. So the cool part is once you start investing, as you buy new stocks or ETFs, they'll actually show up in this section right here. You can click on their value on the right hand side. So for QQQ, where the value is $9,509, you can click on that and you can show it in different ways. So that $9,500 worth was how much equity, meaning how much dollar value I own of that stock. But I could do something cool, like, hey, how is it performing today? I could click today's return and you can see, oh, well, shoot, it's down $47. But if I go to my total return, you can see it's up $1,297. So it's really interesting to see if you want to look at, you know, specific breakdowns of this stuff. Now I like having it by my equity. And then the other cool thing is you can actually organize your investments here too. So I like to organize by the equity, but if you wanted to say, have Google be the first thing that you see when you go down to your investment section, you can long press on Google and then you can just drag it straight to the top, just like that. So it's really intuitive. You can move things around. And then at the bottom here, you can see the different cash that you have in here as well. When you have Robinhood Gold, you can get 3.5% APY on any uninvested cash. But we're going to primarily be focusing on the different investment types. They also have prediction markets, which I got to admit, I'm not really a fan of. It's kind of like gambling. So if you go into prediction markets, you can check out, like, you can literally bet on like climate stuff if the weather is going to be higher or lower than a certain degree. Like it gets really, really risky in this stuff. I would just try to avoid prediction markets altogether when you're just getting started. Then you can set up recurring investments. You can see I have three. Every single week, I'm spending a hundred dollars buying Bitcoin, Robinhood, and QQQ. Now I'll show you how to set up that in a minute here. I'm just going to keep rolling through the home screen so you get an idea for what this looks like. You can see my realized profit and loss down here. And in the past month or year to date. Now I've actually made sure that I sold off some of the investments that I didn't want earlier this year. So right now I'm down $144 overall from just stuff that I sold, even though my account was up, I don't know, $13,000, whatever we saw at the beginning. I have a lot more money in the account. I just haven't sold it yet. So it doesn't recognize it as a loss or a gain. OK, and scrolling down, you just have a little bit of the promotion section of Robinhood, some of the stuff that they have going on and what they think you might be interested in. And then you can create. These are pretty cool. Watch lists or screeners. So you can add the different investments that you're thinking about potentially buying right in the one list so you can access them later on. So I'll show you how to do that when we talk about the list there. And then you can just see the list from the drop down menu. These are ones that I've created before. So in a nutshell, that is the home screen. And what I'd like to do is start going over each feature kind of one by one. First, let me just breeze through lists because I think this is kind of cool when you're just getting started. Well, to create a list, if you scroll down on the home screen, you can create a watch list here and you can name it. So I'll name this test video and I can go ahead and click create, right? So now this has created a sort of like a little tab at the bottom there where I can add different stocks. Maybe I'm considering investment so I could go and click find products. Let's say that I wanted to potentially invest in Tesla or maybe on Apple. And there's some other ones that I could be interested in. Let's say something like hyper liquid. I don't know what that is, but any sort of investments I could add to the list pretty easily from this menu, which is kind of cool. And then later when I'm like, oh, which stocks did I want to potentially buy? I come back here and start looking at more details about the stock. You can also search on the search icon in the bottom of the screen here. You can look for them here. So let's say I wanted to get Disney in there. I click on Disney and in the top right, there is a plus icon. I could click on that and then I can add that into test video. And just like that, go back over here and boom, Disney appears in here. It's also now at the bottom here. And yeah, it's just a cool little feature that you can have in terms of the different watch list you can create. OK, so for the first thing that you need to be able to do to actually start investing is, well, get money into your Robinhood investing account. There's a couple different ways that you can do this. One is on the home screen. If you have that buying power tab, you can click on buying power and then you can click on deposit funds from here. From there, it could prompt you to link your bank account and it uses a third party service called Plaid. Now, Plaid is typically what you use. It's very secure. Other brokerages use it as well. It's like a third party app that you can sign into your banking institution with and link directly to Plaid into Robinhood and then you can start doing quicker transfers with it. Now, the other way you can get money in is if you click on the little guy icon in the bottom right and then you click on transfer right here. Now you can see Robinhood is going to shield what I'm doing just because they don't want people to be able to access my banking information. However, I will do this section. I'm going to deposit like $100 just to show you this process. I'll take screenshots and kind of walk you through it just like that. OK, so for the first thing it's going to do, it's ask you how much to deposit. So I'm going to do $100 and click on continue. Once I do that, it asks me the different payment methods that I want to make. OK, so when you click on the drop down from the from tab, what that brings up are the different accounts that you already have linked up. You can see that they have an option for Apple Pay 2, which is kind of cool, but I haven't really used that for myself. Now, what you can do is you can click add account and when you click add account, it gives you two different options. You can do a debit card or a bank account. Now, debit cards allow you to have instant transfers and they give you $10k daily deposit. So that might work for a lot of people. Some people nowadays, I feel like don't even have debit cards. So what I've done is done the bank account. And again, typically it takes four to five days to link and then it takes a little bit of time for your money to then transfer from your bank into Robinhood. So if you want this money quick, you want to access it immediately. Debit card is the way to go. If you're OK waiting a little bit, then I would do the bank account. And I personally use bank account and they give me instant access as soon as I start transferring money. So when I click on bank account, you can see that is going to load and ask for approval to your device. So I'm going to go ahead and reapprove my account. Again, just another layer of protection that makes me feel even more confident with Robinhood. So right now I'm scanning my face, so it's able to recognize what's going on. And I'll update this in one second. So now you can see that once you're through, you're prompted to use Plaid. You can either use a guest account or like me, you can create an account with Plaid because as you start getting more in the finance stuff, you're probably going to use Plaid service a lot more. So with Plaid, it's really straightforward. All you do is you search for the bank that you are actually linked with, that you have an account with, and you can link it directly into Plaid and through Robinhood. So for me, if I search something like TD Bank, you can see it brings you in to log in and then you click continue to log in. And once you do that, you are actually prompted to log in through your actual bank's website. So again, super secure with that stuff. And when it comes to that, it just makes it a lot easier because you don't have to balance linking it and like looking for your checking, routing, all these different numbers to link. It actually will just pull it all in. You're automatically linked up and then you're good to go. And then when you're back in Robinhood, it's as simple as typing in the value that you want again, which would be $100. In this case, you can move it from that new account that was linked and then to the account that you have open on Robinhood and you can make it a one time deposit, right? And then you can click on deposit that $100. Now you can see my deposit was initiated. And what that means is it's not quite yet in Robinhood. It's going to take till tomorrow for me to be able to use it. Now, when I click on continue, you can see Robinhood then though gives me instant deposit available. So while it's on the way, they gave me access to $100 that I can then invest with. So even though it says you're linking up a checking account and it might take days to transfer, well, they actually end up giving you some instant deposit access that you can use and just makes it a lot more straightforward. OK, so now after I've transferred it, I can go back to the home screen. You can see my buying power went from $35 to $135. So we've successfully transferred this money in and that gears us up for the next step, which is actually finding different stocks to invest in. Listen, before we get into which investments you should make, I want to talk about two different accounts. One is an individual investing account. This is what you open when you create your Robinhood account. This is just like a regular account that you're taxed on, right? Then you have something called a Roth IRA. You can see it's the second tab I have there at the top. I've got $40,000 in my regular individual investing account and I've got $34,000 in my Roth IRA. If I click into my Roth IRA, this is where I think like you have to know the difference between the two. The Roth IRA is what I think is the most important investment vehicle, the investment account that you can possibly have. And it's so powerful that the IRS, the government, actually limits how much money you can contribute to this account. So in 2026, the maximum you can contribute is $7,500. However, the main benefit to this is whatever happens in this account, if it gains, you know, an incredible amount, let's say I made 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, a million dollars in profits, right? No matter what I do, I can buy, I can sell. And in the future, I could withdraw every single dollar in this account after the age of 59 and a half and not pay a single extra dollar on taxes in this account. Everything's already accounted for. It is such a cheat code. The other cool thing is with this account is as you contribute, so $7,500 is the maximum limit. I would honestly start with this account, try and max it out and move to an individual account or, you know, you got to mix in your 401k. But with this account, I would try to max it out. And the cool part is if you contribute $7,500, well, you could withdraw that completely tax-free before 59 and a half, right? The only caveat is that any gains that you make. So if you look at this and my all time says I'm up $6,149, well, I could withdraw $28,000 of the contributions that I've made into this account tax-free for this example, right? And that's really, really cool. Now, this theoretically is going to be worth a heck of a lot more as time goes on and I'm going to be able to withdraw it all completely tax-free versus the actual investing individual account here that if I were to withdraw today and I sold everything, well, 50% of this is all gain. So over $13,000 that I'm actually going to have to pay taxes on. So for me, the Roth IRA is the smartest investment account that you can start with and the best thing that you can open on Robinhood if you understand the differences between the two. I'll link a video that explains both of them again in the description of this video. You want to check it out, but I would honestly start with the Roth IRA and just know that this is for investing for the long term. A lot of people think investing is get rich quick. You're investing for the long term. Oh, and by the way, to open up a Roth IRA, all you need to do is scroll to the very top of the home screen where you have these tabs at the top, scroll to the far right, click on the plus icon and then in this, when you don't have a Roth IRA open, it will actually give you the option. So you can click retirement right here and then you can see Roth IRA and that's the one that you'd want to go after. OK, actually, before we select a stock or an investment to make, I actually want to talk about one of the most common questions I get, which is what specific investments should I make? Which stocks should I invest in or which ETFs should I invest in? Yeah, I've heard of an ETF. We're going to cover that right now. But basically, this is my response. Investing is so much easier than most people think. There's a lot of people out there that try to make it sound extremely complicated. I think a lot of advisors, unfortunately, try to make investing sound really complicated just so they can make money from it. And it's a really a shame because I personally think investing is one of the easiest things to do. If you want to get decent returns, it's not hard. You just need time in the market and that's going to be what gives you the true results from investing. Now, there are a lot of people out there on YouTube that make the space really clouded. They make it seem like you need to have this specific strategy and all this stuff. The truth of the matter is, even the experts, the advisors, the people that have funds out there, their goal is to always beat or outperform the market. And I think it's something crazy, like 80% of them fail at it. So if you find somebody on YouTube or you find somebody on the street that's claiming, hey, I know that I can beat the market. Well, if they can actually do that at a high velocity and they're accurate with it, they'd probably be managing billions of dollars in a hedge fund and it would be insane, right? So there's ways that you could try to beat the market and there's actually strategies that I've tried to do it as well. And some of those are actually working right now, which is interesting, but I don't think that it's something that anybody just getting into investing should try to do. I think that everybody should focus on tracing the market and understanding the fluctuations and just understanding what investing actually is. Because the fact of the matter is, if you're just starting, you probably have no idea what to invest in. And so I think the easiest way to ease yourself into the market and feel most comfortable, be able to sleep at night and know that you're making sound, solid investments is at least trace the thing that everybody's trying to do better then. Because when you invest in a market tracing ETF, which when I say ETF, instead of going out and picking like a Tesla or an Apple or any individual company, you're getting a basket. So Tesla and Apple and these other companies might be involved in that basket, but you're getting this diversification because you're buying the basket itself and all the investments that are within it. So when I say that, I talk about things like VTI, which is Vanguard's total stock market index, which literally is like all of the stock market in one. And on average, you can expect for things like VTI, VOO, SPY is another one. These on average will return you somewhere between eight to 10, 11% annually on the stock market over time. Now you might be in a bear market where the stock market's crashing. So the results might vary on that, but this is the benchmark that everybody out there is trying to beat. They want to outperform it and most people simply can't do it. And a lot of people try to make it sound really complicated. So we are going to be investing and that's how I would start if I was just beginning. Now do your own research into this stuff. I am not a financial advisor by any way, shape or form, but this to me is a no brainer, best way to approach investing when you have no idea what's going on. You'll ease yourself into the market, you'll start seeing the values going up and down and you'll start to understand what to look for to a degree. And that's why I'm going to be talking about some of those investments for the remainder of this video. Okay, so when it comes to finding investments on Robinhood, fortunately, it's really straightforward if you know what you're looking for. All you need to do is click the little magnifying glass icon on the bottom right of the screen and you're able to search for specific stocks, okay? So let's say you wanted to invest in, I don't know, Sony stock, right? Maybe you have a PlayStation, you're like, oh, I'm interested in buying Sony. You could look up something like Sony. Now I'll show you more details with the ETF stuff I was talking about, but all of your investments, ETFs, your crypto, like anything that you're trying to invest in on the market is going to give you this screen. So I looked for Sony, you saw I was able to just click into Sony and these are all the details of the stock that you can get here. So you can see it's $27.57. Much like on that front screen, we can see how it's performed over the week, month, three months, year to date, one year, five year, and the max, okay? So this is, it's very similar to what we saw on that. As you scroll, you get a digest and you understand a little bit like what's going on with Sony. So it gives you some highlights of recent moves and things that are going on in this digest section. You can click into it and you can see, you know, this was updated six minutes ago. So up to date, like real time stuff information that you can get from here. And then you get all these different news that pertain to Sony down here. Now, if I go back and I scroll, you can get about Sony, just understand what they are, like what they're actually involved in for investment purposes. So they're not just like your PlayStation. They're not just a gaming console. They also have, you know, home entertainment and sound, imaging products and solutions, mobile communication, semiconductors, financial services, and more. You understand, you just get a breadth of it from a really high level. You can see who the CEO is, when it was founded, how many employees they have, where the headquarters is. So yeah, you might not know, but Sony is international. And as you scroll down, you can see the volume of this stuff, you know, where it opened at, the price that it opened at, the market cap, meaning, you know, how much value is behind the actual company itself. You've got PE ratio, how much it was traded overnight, like just some of this information that, you know, isn't necessarily going to be the ultimate determinant in what you invest in or not, but it's just cool to see a lot of this information. We've also got news down here in another section, similar to the digest that I was talking about before. And then really cool within Robinhood, you've got these analyst ratings. So 24 analysts have actually gone in and rated this. Only 4% are saying sell, while 96% are saying buy. Now you want to take this stuff with a grain of salt and do your own research into the investments that you do end up making. Like, I don't know, based off this information, if Sony is a good or a bad investment, even though 96% of analysts that Robinhood is featuring say that it's a buy, that's not what I'm going to base my criteria off of to know if I should go and buy this. It is helpful if I'm interested in buying a stock, and then I see all of these people that are backing my opinion. Now you also get these Morningstar research reports down here where you can see what the bulls and the bears are saying. Basically, if you're feeling good about making this investment, the bulls are going to make you feel good. Bulls means bullish, and that's when the stock market goes up or the stock in particular. And then you've also got what the bears are saying. So if you're feeling bad about it, you think it's going to tank, well, then you're going to love this section because these are people that agree with you and it talks about all that stuff. This is something, this is a research report that you would get with Robinhood Gold, which is their $5 a month service that you could pay for in the future if you want to. I've got a separate video on Robinhood Gold. Personally, I think it's worth it, but definitely watch that video before you just buy it, and I'll link it in the description. You can see their earnings. So is Sony outperforming? Are they underperforming compared to what their earnings per shares, their expectations are and things like that? So it's just good information. You can see what lists that they're on. So Robinhood actually categorizes different investments in different lists. You can see that this one's part of Japan, software, it's media, hardware, like it's just part of these general lists. So if you're looking for more companies that were in the media space, you can click on media and then boom, you can see that there's 73 different companies in this list. Sony, Comcast, Warner Bros, like just a lot of different, you know, a lot of different companies that you can consider investing into. People who own this also own these frequently. So Sony, Nintendo, Disney, Microsoft, it just gives you an overview of that kind of stuff. And then you can see that Sony pays, this is actually my history. So I did back in 2016 own Sony and they paid me what's called a dividend. Now dividends versus growth is another topic, but dividend investing are companies that have kind of like grown a lot that feel like their money is better. Like when they earn profits, you can make better decisions with your money. You can go reinvest in them or other companies and they'll pay you portions of that profit. Whereas if you're like a company like Tesla, they don't pay dividends because what they want to do is take all of the money, reinvest it in the company and try to make the share price kind of as high as possible, right? Or like they can take it and do other inventions and things like that, which ultimately like makes the value go up. So that's what it looks like when you're looking at different stocks. And again, I could look up something like Disney, right? And it's going to be the exact same screen that you saw there, all the same information as you scroll through. And yeah, it's just really uniform and straightforward. Now this is the one that I was talking about VTI, okay? Now VTI is here and this is something that I invest in personally in one of my accounts. So when you determine the stock that you want to buy, let me actually show you how you can go ahead and buy it. Okay, so now here's the really good stuff. We have transferred in our money, we're ready to buy this ETF or a stock. All you do, you search for it, you click into it and then you're on the screen for that particular investment. You click on that red trade icon you see in the bottom right there and you can click buy. Now you saw trade options up here there, that's for a separate video, completely different strategy when it comes to investing when you are a beginner. All you want to do is learn how to buy and sell, understand the market. So here we go. You can actually see how much money you have available. So I transferred in $100 plus my original $35 in buying power. So I could spend up to $135 on this. Now I could put in as little as $5 here, click review, swipe up and just like that, it would literally buy the stock. So now what I'm going to do is show you a couple different order types. So that would buy at the market. You can see it says market order at the top center of the screen here. And that means whatever the price is currently trading at. So for VTI, it's $336.20. If I wanted to buy it and it just dropped to $336.19. I don't know if you saw that, but whatever it is right now, so it could have gone up, gone down. That is what it's going to buy at with a market buy. In the top right, you can see it says dollars. When I click on that, it brings up these different options. So you can buy in dollars, which is typically what you're going to end up doing because it's tough to calculate like the fractional shares that you would want to invest with. But basically you could buy in shares. So if you knew you wanted five shares of VTI, it would cost you $1,600. I just clicked on shares, clicked on five, and then I could review and swipe up. But you can see that I don't have enough buying power to actually buy five shares. So if I click on shares again in the top right, you can see you can set up recurring investments, limit orders, trailing stop orders, stop orders, or stop limit orders. Now recurring investments are really cool. You saw me at the beginning, I had $100 every single week in three different investments. This is how I set it up. So I just clicked on recurring and then you could do either every market day, you could do every week, every two weeks, every month, whatever you want. And you could do, say it was every week, I could click continue and I wanted to invest, you know, literally five bucks. Again, continue. You select which account you want it to come from. You would probably be doing buying power, which is where you just made that initial deposit. But you could also do it directly with your bank accounts, the other options that you see here, you click continue. And then this is a backup payment method. So if I run out of how much money I've transferred into Robinhood, it could potentially pull from my bank account, but I'm going to skip that because I always am transferring money in. And you can see that this would set up for $5 every Tuesday or whatever day, you know, you can go and customize this stuff. It's going to be able to do an investment weekly and I could swipe up and that would submit it. Okay. So that's weekly investments. Now, if I go back, sorry, I got to go way, way, way, way back here. You can see limit orders. So you can buy VTI at a maximum price or low, meaning so the stock right now, or this ETF is valued at $336.28. Let's say, oh, I value this at $335. I don't want to buy it until it hits 335. Well, you can set a limit order and your limit price for it would be $335. Meaning I don't want to buy it for anything above $335. Risk you run there is let's say the stock market from here never drops below and VTI doesn't go down to $335. I will never be able to buy it at that price and I'm kind of like locked out from it. So it will tie up the funds that you're looking to buy at that limit, right? So for 335, let's say I tried to buy one share. So I spending $335. Now I'm going to lose access to that 335 until it buys at that price, or I can cancel the order then I get access to the funds again. Okay, so let's pretend that you've now clicked trade, you click buy, you input the value and you ended up buying the stock or ETF. Now again, I'm in VTI and I told you I've got positions in this investment already. What actually happens? Well, the first thing is it will now show up on the home screen of your application and it will be in your account. So as you scroll down, you can see stocks and ETF and VTI appears in mine. So if I click into VTI, it gets really cool here because it starts giving you a breakdown of your investments. You can scroll down and you can see that, wow, here's your current position. It tells you how many shares you have. So I've got 58 shares. It gives you the market value. How much are the 58 shares that I have worth right now, which is $19,539. My average cost is $249.44 and then it gives you my portfolio diversity. Now this is in my Roth IRA where I literally only have two different investments. Well, VTI is one of them that makes up nearly 60% of it. And I've made so far $5,000 off of it, 34.78%. Again, that's unrecognized. I haven't sold it yet, but when I do, that's theoretically how much money I would make. And again, because this is in a Roth IRA, it's completely tax-free. Very, very cool to see stuff like that. Now you can see I have a recurring investment setup that I did before. This one's for $14.70. When I set this up, it was so I would hit my max contribution limit in this year. And then as I scroll down, you can see you get other sections that now appear. You have history. When you click on history, you can see what's been going on. So you can see all the different recurring buys that I've made, which is literally daily for VTI. Super cool. And you can see things like the dividends that are being paid. So right now, whenever VTI does pay a dividend, which happens to be quarterly, most dividend companies or dividend ETFs, things like that, they pay every quarter. So every three months. This one is $50.58. Now, because I keep investing in VTI, the next time they pay a dividend, it will be higher. So you can see it's kind of climbing. So it started at $30. Now it ends at 50. And each time along the time that it goes on, it is paid a little bit more money. And this will just continue for the foreseeable future. Now, another super common question that I get when it comes to investing is, hey, Dalton, when should I sell my investments? And to be honest, my ideal answer to this is never. I try to personally invest in things that I am fully comfortable with, holding pretty much forever. As I get towards retirement age, that's when I'm likely going to start restructuring my portfolio, selling, getting some gains, and understanding a different strategy that I wanna approach. But the way I look at investing is, well, you're investing, you're not trading. Trading would be buying, selling, trying to time, do these different things. I just don't think that's a really good strategy if I'm being completely honest. When you are investing, I try to buy and I try to hold. But there is some times where the fundamentals of companies have changed. Like for example, I was invested in AT&T. Then they did a complete shift in their entire business model. And I decided, hey, I don't think this really aligns with what I wanna have in my investment portfolio at this point. And so I decided to sell out of them. Now you might be wondering, hey, how do you sell on the accounts? Well, you can go to your account, right? And you can see the different investments that you have. You can click into them. And now all you wanna do is you click trade. And now you see this other option that appears. Before it was just trade options and buy. Well, now you have that middle option, which is sell. So if I click sell, it's very similar to how you bought. You can set a specific number of shares that you wanna sell. Let's say I wanted to sell five shares. Then I could get $1,600 out of it. Well, I could also drop it down and do sell in dollars and say I wanted $500 worth. I could do that, review. I could swipe up and just like that, it would sell. Now, the other thing is we talked about limit buys. Well, there's also limit orders where you can sell it at a minimum price. So let's say that the VGI right now is $336. I wanted to sell this when it hit $340. Well, then I could go click trade. I can click sell, go into dollars here. I could do a limit order. And then when I do the limit order, I could sell it at $340. And let's say I wanna sell like two shares of it. I can click continue, review. And just like that, I could swipe up and it would not sell unless it hits that specific price. Now, you can see the time in force is set to 4 p.m. today. If you wanted this to last like a week, I mean, you could set it up to 90 days out on here and you could go ahead and do that too. So it's pretty flexible with how you wanna go and sell. And then what would happen from there is that you would sell it and then that sold would go into your buying power, okay? So we've transferred money in, we've bought a stock. Now we've sold. Well, what happens when you sell? Typically, you actually have to wait a few days for your funds to settle to be able to transfer it out. So maybe you wanna get the money back into your bank account. How would you actually go about that? So you've just sold. Again, you probably have to wait. Let me go into my buying power here. I can click on buying power. There's deposit funds, right? You're like, oh shoot, there's no withdraw. Well, it's really straightforward. Let me go back into Robinhood here. You can go into your little guy icon in the bottom right. He's like my little hero. And then you can click on transfer. And then in transfer, there gives you the option to withdraw right within here. And because your account is already linked up from what we did in the previous step, you're gonna be able to make that deposit. You're gonna transfer out of your account back into your bank account. And it is that simple. Now, if you need funds immediately, well, my thought process is you probably shouldn't be investing funds that you're going to need immediately. But just know that there is a waiting period to let your funds settle when you sell. And then you have to wait a little bit for the brokerage to send it to your bank account. But it will happen. I would say maximum takes about five days. But yeah, that's how you get your money. Okay, now I know this video is primarily focusing on investing, investment, sound investment, stuff like that. But I wanna talk about the cryptocurrency section here on Robinhood. So at the bottom, you can see a little crypto icon on the bottom left. If you click on that, it's going to bring you into this crypto section here. You can see I have $5,577 worth of crypto. That's all currently in Bitcoin right now within Robinhood. Now, I keep more Bitcoin on something that's called cold storage. And I have like a nano ledger is what it is. And basically what that is, you can think of it like a wallet, right? And so it's a physical thing that I actually upload my Bitcoin onto. And it's not online. It's actually just within that one device. That's what I typically do with it. But you can buy, you can sell, and you can transfer crypto. And a lot of people ask me my thoughts on crypto in general. And my thoughts are this. I think there's too much of an upside potential to not necessarily invest in something like crypto. But it wouldn't be something that I ultimately start my portfolio off with at this point. I think my goal is to have no more than 10% of my net worth be in cryptocurrency. And that's specifically Bitcoin. I don't really have any other cryptocurrency right now. So actually, let me just show you. It's very similar screen. If I click into Bitcoin, you can see my holding right now. It's up 0.89% in this. If I wanted to transfer out, as I was talking before, I can click on send right there in the middle or receive and I get a QR code. You can send and receive it securely. But Robinhood does have a whole list of different cryptocurrencies. These are the recently added ones. You can click show more. You can explore the different cryptos. You can search here. And yeah, let's say you wanted to invest in Bitcoin. You can click buy crypto and then you can go into BTC, which is Bitcoin. And then similarly, all the same different order types that we saw with the regular investing, you can do with cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. And same with selling. Everything is the very same as the other accounts. And it's just really straightforward. Crypto again, isn't something that I'd focus on when you're just beginning, but it is really cool that they have this as a feature within Robinhood. So listen, before we wrap up, we do need to talk about the least fun, most annoying part of all this, which is taxes. And I'm not your CPA. This isn't personal tax advice, but everybody's situation is gonna be a little bit different. I'm gonna show you exactly how this works in a super simple beginner level. So you're not surprised in April. See, when you invest in a regular taxable Robinhood brokerage account, so not your Roth IRA or any other retirement account, there are two main ways that the IRS actually cares about your money. Number one, dividends and interest. See, anytime a stock or ETF in your regular account pays you a dividend or you earn interest on any uninvested cash, well, that's considered taxable income for that year. You'll see it inside Robinhood as a dividend or you'll see interest in your cash history. But behind the scenes, all of that gets added up into your taxes for the tax season. Now, number two is realized capital gains and losses. When you sell an investment for more than what you paid for it, that's a profit. Well, that's called a capital gain. And when you sell an investment for less than what you paid, that's a capital loss. Gains are typically taxable and losses can actually sometimes offset your gains, which is a tax benefit. But that's where a good tax professional or tax software comes in. The key is this, okay? If you hold your investments and you don't sell, you haven't realized the gain or loss yet. The value going up and down inside the app, well, it actually isn't taxed. It's only when you sell it that the clock starts ticking, okay? Now, the good news is that Robinhood does a ton of the annoying work for you. Once a year, usually at the beginning of tax season, Robinhood's gonna generate an official tax document in your account. And they're usually 1099 forms that summarize how much dividend income you received, how much interest you earned, and your realized capital gains and losses from selling investments. So to find this stuff, it is really straightforward. All you need to do, this is the home screen. If you click on the little guy icon in the bottom right, in the hamburger menu in the top left, you can go down and scroll into Tax Center. Now, in Tax Center, you can see the documents that have been provided. Now, this is where you're gonna get your Robinhood Markets Consolidated Form 1099, okay? Super straightforward from here. You can click it, download it, send it to your accountant. You can use it for your taxes, whatever you do to file your taxes. But the best part is, you definitely don't have to go through every trade that you've ever made and look at what you did. You don't need to look at all your dividends and add them up manually. Robinhood does all of that for you and makes it super streamlined. And when you use a service like TurboTax, well, you can log in directly through Robinhood there as well, and it will pull all of the information for you. All right, so anyways, that's pretty much Robinhood in a nutshell. It's one of the most user intuitive applications out there. If you have any questions, make sure you leave them in the comment section. I try to get back to everybody, especially on videos like this. I find it really important. And if you want some more resources, they'll be in the description of this video. And check out this video here. It's 10 hidden features of Robinhood that I think is really important that you enable and get going. So check that one out next. If you made it this far, leave a like. I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming and have a great day.