Robinhood Beginner's Guide 2026 | Full Guide w/Timestamps + Free Stock

So today we are doing a beginner's guide to the Robinhood investing app. Now, as we go through this, there's going to be a lot more to learn, but this beginner's guide is going to cover some of the basics. We're going to be looking at the user interface on the app itself, and of course how to buy, sell, and do some of the most important things when it comes to the app itself. Now, if by any chance you do not already have the Robinhood app and want to go ahead and sign up, I'll have a special partner link in the show notes down below, as well as here on screen with a QR code to get you a free stock. When going through and signing up, that link does help support us out, but you get to help us make more free content just like this by using those special links. And at the end of this video, I'm going to have additional tutorials that go beyond the beginner's guide to help you continue to use the app. All right, so let's get started here. First and foremost, there have been a couple of updates and changes here for the Robinhood app, but if you're brand new, this obviously will just all be new to you entirely. The first thing that changes is up here at the very top is going to have all your different types of accounts in your space all at once. So it typically will start with your investing and then it'll switch over to your traditional IRA. If you have one, same thing with a Roth IRA, then a spending account, any joint accounts that you add in from any other partners. And then you have strategies as well as additional options to add different accounts. As you continue to open up new things that add into your Robinhood overall account. One of the other things that you notice to here is instead of having to click up at the top, if you kind of just hold up and slide over to the left or right hand side, it will go ahead and take you over to that next page, which is a little different from the base version of Robinhood, because sometimes that will actually be something of a function in the past, but now it will move you over. Now the next thing you're going to see here is your total value invested in that one particular section. As you saw earlier with the traditional IRA, we have a different dollar amount here. Those two things are not added together. They are completely separated here for us, but just something to keep in mind. It usually has a toggle on the current day, but you can toggle onto the week, the month, three months, a year to date, as well as additional timeframes. So you can see how your portfolio is doing overall. It has it by the dollar amount as well as percentage. And that is a cumulative up here at that top number. You can see it moves in real time, depending on the time of day, what you have in your actual holdings as well. And next up here is going to be the buying power. This actually allows you to buy into stocks if you wanted to. And that is indicative of the number over here on the right hand side. If it's at zero, you need to add money in by depositing or have access to margin, which is not something we'll talk a lot about here in today's video, but just something to keep in mind so that way you can go ahead and do purchasing, which we'll do here in just a moment. Now next up here is going to be some information that shows up differently. Every single time you open up your app, sometimes it'll have just one item. Sometimes a couple, sometimes it's a nice bonus. Sometimes it is just information for you. Like if the stock market's closed for holiday, you can just close these off by hitting the X button and it'll swipe it off and then it'll bring back up all your other things here in the app. Now you can see here for us, it starts over here with options. This is something we're not going to be talking about again. Also here, this is a little bit more advanced when it comes to investing. So just something to keep in mind, but your options will be here at the very top. If you by chance have any cryptocurrency inside of the Robinhood app, you'll see them right over here. You'll also have access to them here at the very bottom with that little icon over here that looks like cryptocurrency. So you'll see anything you have altogether there. Now, next up, and the thing we're going to focus on the most here today is going to be stocks and ETFs. That's all going to be over here in this section here for you. Now, obviously, if you haven't purchased anything before, you won't see anything on here. But just once you do, I want to go over some information. You'll see the ticker number of the companies and holdings you have, how many shares of those you have as well. You could see some of these are full shares like 300. You could see this one here has one hundred point one four. And this one is actually not even a full share. It's point zero zero nine five six one shares, which means you could actually buy companies in fractions instead of having to buy the full share, which is great for you as a beginner, because that means if you want to put in a dollar, five dollars or ten dollars into a company, you can definitely do that. And it's going to be something we'll show you in this process because it's great for beginners and getting started with your account with a small dollar amount. Now, you'll see these in red and green over here on the right hand side with these little charts. These are the company's individual performance, typically of that given day. And then on the right hand side, it'll show you the current price of those stocks, as well as if it's higher or lower from the starting amount of the day. But what you can do is also click on here and you can change this to see your equity, your total returns, your total return percentage. But you can choose how you see this display data, and it'll stay like that constantly until you change it again. Now, if you want to go into individual companies here, for example, we're going to go into the SoFi. This will go into a lot more data and every company and ETF will have all of this information here as well. So you'll be able to see the company's charts. You'll be able to see how many shares you hold, your average cost, what it is market value wise, the percentage of your portfolio, which is nice to know total returns for the day and total returns overall. Now, down here, there's going to be some requirements for margin. Again, we're not going to be talking about here today on that information, but just something to know that it is available there for you. You are also going to have opportunities for reinvesting on an automatic basis, which is great for beginners. And I will show you that as well, too. And then here you're going to have some information about the company, the CEO, the number of employees, and then some additional data down here for you as well, such as how the 52 week high is doing the 52 week low or PE ratio, some more basic data, which then you can find other ways online to get more in depth. And then down here, you're going to see some news based off of this company in particular. And again, this will be very similar to any other stock that you're going into or ETF if you want to find a lot more information about them. Down here, you're going to see some analyst information, such as if it's potentially worth buying, holding or selling, and then why that's the case. And then down here, you're going to see some additional trends. So you get a lot of data for each company that you're going to have. It might seem overwhelming. And as a beginner, I just want to let you know, you don't have to know all of this stuff. You can just kind of take this in a little bit at a time. And over time, these things will become easier for you to understand what the value is for these companies. Now, this is an individual holding that we have for this stock right over here. And down here at the bottom, you're going to see that it says individual. This is your typical individual stock holding company or account, I should say. And if you click on there like I just did, you're going to be able to switch over to, let's say, your traditional, your Roth. If you have either one of those and be able to make a purchase in that particular account without having to go all the way back to the main page, just something to kind of think about. Now, this little icon that you see on the left hand side of the word traditional IRA, that right there is the icon for anything to do with retirement. So just kind of something to keep in mind, similar to anything that does with crypto is this icon. And anything that does with your traditional brokerage account, like regular brokerage account, I should say, is going to be with this little graph icon as well. So there's something to keep in mind as we go through these. And you might see these icons pop up throughout the video. All right. So we jumped back here to the main page. Now, there are a lot more things here on the actual user interface for Robinhood. But we're not going to get too much into those. You might stumble upon them as you are going through this process. But just something to keep in mind as you keep learning, you'll keep having a better understanding of all the different functions and features that Robinhood has available for you. Now, before we go through the process of buying, selling and all those other great things when it comes to getting into investing. The other thing I want to talk about is the profile icon over here on the right hand side. I go ahead and click on this and that's going to take you to your overall account. I mentioned earlier when we were looking at those graphs, those were for each account individually. This over here actually has your total inside of your Robinhood account, as you can see right over here. And then it breaks them all down here towards the very bottom. So a really great way to kind of just see everything holistically if you really wanted to. And this is also going to be the same place where you can go ahead and do a transfer into Robinhood as well. So if you are wanting to do deposits, this is going to be the place to do it. Although there are a few other options to do this as well, so this is not exclusively the only spot, but we will come back here in just one moment, because the last thing I need to show you is this top left hand side over here, the hamburger icon here, right? It's the three stacked lines. If we click on this, this is going to be our menu page. This is where you can make sure that you have your account information correct. You can upgrade to the Robinhood Gold, which is their subscription. I have a whole separate video if you want to learn more about that. Link will be in the show notes. But you can come in here and make sure all of your information is correct. Updated change. Anything you need is going to be in this menu section. So I just wanted to keep that in mind. We're going to go back one step here. And now we're going to go ahead and click on the word transfer, because now we want to go ahead and deposit money into our Robinhood account. Now that we have a basic understanding of how the user interface here is working, we'll get some money in the account. And then that way we can go and do some purchasing. All right. So from here, what we're going to do is click on the word transfer. And this is going to bring us over here to our transfer page. Now here on the transfer page, I actually have to do this by screenshots because it won't let me record it. So just something to keep in mind as I go through this. It's a little bit different. So the way it's going to look is here towards the very top. You have three options. You have deposit, withdraw and transfer. So to make this super simple, all we have to do is click on the deposit option here for us. And from here, it's going to ask how much you would like to deposit. Now, obviously, there's a daily limit. I wish I could hit that daily limit. And then they give you a couple of amounts that you could transfer pretty large amounts, to be honest. But for example, here today, we're just going to go ahead and say we want to deposit in ten dollars. And you can see the word continue pop up here for us. We're going to go ahead and click on this. And from here, it's going to show us where it's going to be transferring from, where it's transferring to, which is our individual account and then the frequency. And here you can actually even have it transfer on a regular basis if you want to set up a reoccurring deposit. But I'm also show you a little bit later how to do a reoccurring investment to individual stocks and ETFs you have in your account. So depending on if you want to switch over which bank account you're transferring from, you can click the little up and down arrows next to your checking account that you have on file and either add a new account or choose another account you have on there. So from here, what we're going to then go ahead and do is click on the word deposit there at the very bottom in black. And then from right over here, you're going to see your deposit be initiated. And then you can go ahead and click on the continue button at the very bottom to move on. Now, here you're going to actually see where it says instant deposit available. Now, that means our ten dollars. I can go ahead and start buying with that right away. Now, typically, the way this works for instant deposits is you can have an instant deposit of up to a thousand dollars or five thousand dollars if you're a Robin Hood gold member. And what that means is that money is available for you right now to go ahead and make purchases with as well as making sure all that money gets transferred over. And then you'll have reaccess to that instant deposit again when you want to do more deposits in the future. So any amount beyond that thousand dollars or five thousand dollars threshold with Robin Hood gold, that money will still get transferred over. It'll just take a couple of days to process and show up into your account. So from right over here, we just got to click on the word continue. And that's going to bring us back over here to our transfers page. And all we got to do is hit the X button on the top left hand side. And then from here, we're back on our profile account, which means all we got to do is click on the graph on the bottom left hand side for our portfolio. All right. So now we're back at the very front of our homepage on Robin Hood. And the way we'll know that is the investing tab is highlighted up here or the investing icon, like we talked about earlier, is also highlighted over here on the bottom. So now let's go ahead and show you how to make a buy when it comes to buying stock on your Robin Hood account. Now, one thing I do want to clarify, too, is whatever we're going to be purchasing here today is not any kind of recommendation. This is just for examples. But what we're going to want to do is first and foremost, go find the company or ETF that we want to purchase. And if you don't already have it in your holdings, like we saw earlier, we want to go ahead and click this little magnifying glass right over here on the bottom right side of the screen, right before your profile icon. We're going to click on this. And this is going to take us kind of to a new section here that we didn't see earlier. This is the browse function. One at the very top, there is the search bar, which is most likely what people are going to use to find the companies they want. But you could also search by going and scrolling in this area here. You're going to see, again, a lot of information might feel overwhelming at first, but no worries on even having to scroll down here because this search bar at the top will pretty much get us to where we want to go. So let's go ahead and click on this. And then it's going to give us the actual option to go either write the full name of the company we want to look for, or we can do the ticker number, which is usually, you know, one to four different letters that are going to bring up the company we're looking for. Our example here today, we're just going to look up an ETF called VOO, and we're going to click on this. And this is just an ETF combined with a bunch of different holdings all in one. Don't really want to get into what this is as a whole. But just as an example, I wanted to show a company or an ETF that had a large dollar amount to purchase one share. So this one right here to get one share is six hundred and twenty eight dollars and ninety eight cents. But the reason I wanted to show this is because this one is a great ETF because it holds the top 500 companies in the United States and it's a large dollar amount. But I mentioned earlier, fractional shares will allow you to buy into this at a small dollar amount. And that means a lot when it comes to just getting started. So whether you're in this fund or an individual stock here at the very bottom, you're going to see the word trade on the bottom right hand side. Now, before I click it, I just want to remind you that on the left hand side, if you have multiple accounts, you want to make sure you're on the correct account you want it to go into. For this one is the individual brokerage account. So we're on the correct one. So what we're going to do is go ahead and click on the word trade, and it's going to bring up a limited number of options here for us because we don't actually own any shares of this fund. Now, if we did, the sell option will also show up. So keep in mind, it might look a little different once you make your first purchase. You'll see this other option here that says trade options. That's a whole separate thing. Again, we're not getting into as a beginner's guide, but just letting you know that is something available in the future. If you so choose. So for us, we're going to go ahead and click on the word buy. And this is going to take us to this new menu setting over here. Now, there's a lot to go over. But what we're going to do is break it down to just the two most important functions when it comes to this section here for us. Essentially, this is how much we want to buy and how much are we wanting to put in dollar wise. So right over here at the very top right, you're going to see where it says the word shares, whereas it might have a different word on it, depending on what you've chosen in the past. But I want to show you if we click on this, it's going to bring us a bunch of different options here for us. Now, this, again, might be a little overwhelming at first, but the biggest thing I want to say is if you are brand new to investing, usually buying in dollars is going to be the most simplest and easiest way to go. It's not the most effective, but it's the easiest. And what this means is you could see here you could start with investing as low as one dollar. That's beautiful. The next option here is to buy in shares. So if you can't buy the full thing, you had to buy in, you know, point zero zero amounts of shares. But then the other option that I like to go over is reoccurring investing. So if you want to make sure you're investing on a regular basis, whether it's every day, every week, every two weeks when you get paid, this is going to be another option here for you as well. So, for example, here today, we're going to do buy in dollars and then I will go back later and show you reoccurring investments, because I believe that these are the most important ways to be able to buy when you are a complete beginner using Robin Hood. So we're going to go ahead to this option here that says buy in dollars. And so at the top right over here, this now changes to the word dollars, which I mentioned earlier. If that's what you click on to begin with, that will now be the word that shows up anytime you go make a purchase unless you change it later on. So now you can see here it has a zero dollar amount on this page. And you can see here in our individual account how much we currently have available to buy with the money that we have in our account once we do our deposit. So for us here, we can choose how much we want to add to this order. Again, you can go as low as one dollar. You can do ten dollars. You do one hundred dollars. You could even do one hundred dollars and fifty cents if you want to. Whatever works best for you. So today's example, we're just going to do ten dollars and then we're going to click on the word review. And this is going to bring up a really nice thing here that gives you an order summary. It's going to give you a basic idea of what you're doing in this moment. So before we swipe up, which is going to be to submit, we just want to double check that we're doing ten dollars and it's going to tell us how much we're going to buy. And again, we can do fractional share. So we're actually going to own a point zero one five eight nine shares. And what's beautiful about this is the next time you do another ten dollars, it's going to add whatever amount of shares it's buying onto the shares you own until you get to whatever dollar amount that you added with the amount of shares. And you can eventually get to one full share without having to spend all 600 at one time or whatever the dollar amount is for that individual stock or ETF. So from here, all we got to do is swipe up to submit. And then right over here, once you did that, you could see that our order has been completed. Now, this will be indicated based off of the time of day. So some stocks, you might have to wait until the market open. Some stocks are available to do this at any time, and some are available just Monday through Friday at a twenty four or five hour period. Now, for this example here today, this is giving you also all the information about what your average is for your purchase, how much you got in shares, which might be a little different than what you saw earlier, just because when you swipe up and when things go through, it might shift a little bit. Could be in your favor, could be out of your favor in that amount. But just keeping in mind that it's not always exact. And in order to do something where you get exactly the amount of shares you want, you have to do something called a limit order. But that's a separate video for a separate functionality in that regard. Now, you can click on the word done or you can also even set up your reoccurring investments as well, which is a great thing. But I'm going to show you how to do that outside of this screen just in case you are not on here. So we're going to click on done. Now it's going to bring you back to the page for the ETF or the individual stock. And now when you scroll down, your new position is showing up here for you. So it shows you all the information about this holding that you have on here now. And if you click on the word trade again, you're going to see the sell option is now popping up here for you as well. Now we talked about reoccurring investments. And if you scroll down just a tiny bit more, you can see here where it says reoccurring investments. So let's go ahead and create an investment that's reoccurring by clicking on that option. And here it's going to tell us what are the frequencies we want to do? You know, let's say most people get paid every two weeks and then we're going to have that right over there. So every two weeks, and it's going to ask us, how much do we want to deposit? Let's go ahead and say that $10. We're going to click on continue. And that's going to ask us, where do we want this money to come from? Now, remember, we have our buying power. And then up here at the top, you're going to actually see the bank account you have on file. Now, if you're anything like me, I would prefer the money that's in my account first and then pull from my bank account second. So we're going to go ahead and click on the account that we have right over here for our buying power. And then we're going to go ahead and click on continue here at the bottom. And then the next thing it's going to ask you is for that backup, like we just mentioned. So I will say, use what I have in my buying power. And if I don't have any buying power, I'm going to go ahead and want to pull from my bank account. But you can also choose to skip up any backup that you might have if you don't want it to pull from your personal bank account. But nonetheless, I think this is a great option to continue to invest even at small dollar amounts so you can make an impact long term. So we clicked on our bank account and the continue button is now highlighted. So we're going to go ahead over here and this is going to be pretty much our overview. We're going to double check to make sure everything looks good. We have our ten dollars every two weeks, our buying power, our backup amount. And then when it starts, this didn't give us the option until up to this point. So you can see this is now starting tomorrow on Thursday. Maybe we don't want that if we get paid on Friday. So we click on here and it's going to give us our calendar. And say, well, we actually get paid on Friday, the fifth click on done. And now that's going to start on Friday. And that actually switches up our frequency over here to every two weeks on a Friday, which is exactly what we would prefer. So if everything here looks good, we can click on review one last time and then we double check everything because we kind of want to. Right. And then if everything looks good, we're just going to go ahead and swipe up. And now our automatic investment for this particular fund or ETF is automatically set up and good for us to go and click on done and you don't have to think twice when it comes to making sure that you're investing for the long term on a consistent basis. If you want to check out your reoccurring investments, you can by clicking down here and show all the individual recurring investments that you might set up because you can set up for multiple stocks, multiple ETFs or whatever works best for you. All right. So we're back here on the page for that particular ETF we were looking at earlier, and I just want to scroll down underneath positions. You're going to see a reoccurring investment. And now you'll see that new reoccurring. You can always come back in here and change the dollar amount. Maybe you're starting to get paid more. You can bump this up to 15 bucks. Fantastic. Maybe you could do it every week. Great. Maybe you need to cut it back a little bit. Also, OK, and you can also do that here in the individual setting or you can go into your overall profile and go into the main menu settings and actually go ahead and change it there as well. So you got multiple sections to find your reoccurring investments if you absolutely needed to. So I'll quickly show you to cancel or change your reoccurring. Just go ahead and click in this section and you'll see all your information here for you. You can click on edit investment. And right here, you can either pause it or end that investment. We're just going to do ending this investment for now. We can click on an investment again. And just like that, we removed that reoccurring investment in just a couple of clicks. Now, let's go ahead and show you how to sell your stocks that you might have. And what we're going to do is actually go back to the main page over here for us, like we talked about earlier. And I'm going to scroll down over here to where we see stocks and ETFs. Now, we have all of our holdings, including the new one we just added here as well. And let's go ahead and click on one of them, like the one we just purchased here. And now if we go back to our trade option here, like we mentioned earlier, there is now a sell option. So let's go ahead and click on sell. And here it's going to give us the option on how much we want to sell. Now, the easiest thing is you want to sell the whole thing. You can just click on sell all on the right hand side over here. Or you can say, I just want to sell five dollars worth of this fund. Whatever option you want to do, you can go ahead and do. Now, keeping in mind, just like when you buy, when you sell, it's not always going to be a perfect match. And you'll see that down here written as well. It might not be exact because we're just doing buying by the dollar amount, not a limit order, which will guarantee what you ask for is what you get if that order goes through. So from here, we're going to go ahead and say we're selling the ten dollars. Let's swipe up. And right over here, you can see our order has been completed. Again, if you're doing this off market hours, it might not go through. Or if you have nobody to be buying, that also might not go through if there is nobody available for that. Probably not the case. But just keeping that in mind, you can view your order if you want to or just go ahead and click on done. And the money that you just made from that sale, right, is going to go into your buying power, which is going to be right over here for you. So that buying power will increase after you make your sale or decrease after you make your purchase on the shares that you have available that you want to buy. So let's go ahead and say you want to withdraw your money from your Robin Hood account. Now, all we got to do is go back down here to the bottom right hand side with the profile icon and click right over here. And this is going to take you to that image that we saw earlier with this transfer button here down at the bottom. Now, before we go to the next step here for you, I just need to let you know is sometimes the money available to withdraw is not always the same amount of money that is available from your buying power. There's a couple of different reasons for this. But the easiest way to explain it is when you sell your stocks, sometimes there is a little bit of a holding period before it becomes available for you to withdraw. So typically anywhere from one to two business days before that money is available in your buying power. And if that continues to persist beyond a couple of days, you can always reach out to the Robin Hood support team to see why that money is taking a little bit longer to become available. OK, so let's go ahead and now go down over here to our transfer button. And we're going to go ahead and click on this to be able to withdraw money from Robin Hood. All right. So we were on this page earlier in the day when we were making a deposit into our Robin Hood account. So the thing that we're going to see here is towards the very top for the main three options. We have the middle option here that says withdraw with that arrow pointing up. So let's go ahead and click on that. Now, from here, it's going to ask you how much you want to withdraw. Now, we talked about earlier. You might not have all the money to withdraw, and that'll have that little question mark here at the bottom next to how much you have available. And if you click on this, it'll sometimes give you the reasons why that we talked about earlier on why some of your money is not currently available. So just that information to keep in mind. So from here, we want to go ahead and just put the dollar amount we want to withdraw. So we're going to do ten dollars, for example, here today. And then we're going to click on continue. Now, from here, it's going to show you where it's being pulled from and then where it's going to. Now, this is the bank we have on file. But if you want to go ahead and change that, just click the little up and down arrow next to that bank account and choose a different bank or go ahead and add a new bank on file. And then when you look at the options here for you, as far as transferring, you got two options. You have your standard free option says it takes about four to five days. But honestly, it's usually about two days at most, sometimes even one day, depending on when you do the transfer. And then there's also the instant transfer. Now, not every account you have on file can do an instant transfer. But if it can, it'll show up here. And this means within less than 30 minutes, that money will show up in your bank. And there is a fee attached to it. The fee is indicative of how much you're transferring. So keep that in mind. So there is some minimums, but there are some maximums on how much it charges. So just make sure you're paying attention to that total fee at the very bottom. So we're going to go ahead and choose for our example here today, the standard four to five days. And then at the bottom, it's going to have that new option there that says withdraw ten dollars. So we're going to go ahead and click on that now up here as well. It is going to bring up a little pop up menu, double checking if we want to have our money a little bit faster for that small fee. You could either click on transfer instantly or the no thanks at the bottom. And we're going to go ahead and click on the no thanks here at the bottom. And then right over here on the screen, you can see the withdrawal has been submitted. And all we have to do is click on continue and wait for that transfer to go and be completed. Now, like I mentioned earlier, this is a beginner's guide to Robin Hood. So we are just covering the basis here when it comes to getting started on the app. Of course, there is more to learn and there is more to dive into, which, of course, will also have covered for you in our show notes down below. We're going to have links to additional videos so you can dive in deeper with utilizing your Robin Hood account. And I mentioned earlier, if you do not already have your Robin Hood account set up, I'll have that special partner link in the show notes down below, as well as a QR code here on screen for you to go ahead and sign up and get that special bonus using that partner link. Now, those links help support us out. So we get to continue to make more free content just like this for you. And speaking of that free content, I'm going to post our next Robin Hood video here so you can keep on diving deeper with utilizing Robin Hood.