Acorn vs. Robinhood 2023: In-depth Analysis
Acorn and Robinhood are online investment tools for younger and less experienced investors. However, they are very different.
Acorns is a robo-advisor that helps people invest by taking the spare change from their digital purchases and putting it into an account. This money is then invested based on the platform’s algorithms and suggestions.
The result is a portfolio that you can set and forget. This is an easy-to-use platform that makes investing as simple as possible. Robinhood is easy and fun to use because of its design, often compared to Twitch gameplay or Tinder’s quick responses.
Acorn vs. Robinhood: Costs
Users should generally keep an eye out for four sorts of fees when using online investment platforms:
Trading Fees: They can (very infrequently) be paid to the broker as a flat fee or, more frequently, the “spread.” This is the difference, if any, between the asset’s purchase and sale prices.
Trading commissions: A broker may charge you a portion of each trade depending on the quantity or value of each transaction.
Inactivity Fees: Any charges the platform makes for actions other than trading, such as holding funds in your brokerage account.
Non-Trading/Other Fees: Any trading-related charges made by this platform that still needs to be mentioned. For instance, a brokerage may charge you when you put money into your brokerage account, withdraw funds from it, or transfer stocks between platforms.
This has an unquestionable advantage in this regard. There are hardly any fees of any type with Robinhood.
No commission, trading fees, or inactivity costs are included in this. Depositing, withdrawing, or moving assets around in your account costs nothing.
You only have to pay fees if you trade on margin, which means using borrowed money. You must sign up for Robinhood Gold at $5 per month to use this service. In this case, you will pay an interest rate of 3% as of March 2022.
Fees have been a problem. One of Robinhood’s selling points to customers between 2015 and late 2018 was that trading was “commission-free.”
Still, the Securities and Exchange Commission stated in December 2020 that because of its unusually high payment for order flow rates, Robinhood customers’ orders were executed at lower prices than other brokers.
Without acknowledging or disputing the SEC’s conclusions, Robinhood consented to a cease-and-desist and agreed to give a $65 million civil penalty.
Acorns, on the other hand, entails a monthly price. You may sign up for Acorns Lite, which provides the platform’s essential investment services, for just $1 monthly. You can get Acorns Personal, which offers a bank account and tax-advantaged retirement accounts, for $3 per month.
The last option is Acorns Family, which adds investing accounts for dependents and costs $5 monthly. (These costs rise to $100 monthly for every budget with more than $1 million.)
Despite this being a technical aspect of its service, acorns also charge an extremely high cost of $50 per asset to move securities out of its platform.
Acorns and Robinhood: Services and Features
Acorns present a comparatively original pitch. Its service automatically fills Users’ advisor and investor roles.
You connect Acorns to your bank accounts and credit and debit cards. The platform then rounds up every purchase you make to the closest dollar and risks the excess in your Acorns account. For instance, if you pay $2.80 for a cup of coffee, your credit card would register a $3 purchase, and $0.20 more would be added to your portfolio by Acorns.
You can manually invest by depositing into your account.
Based on your risk tolerance and goal for growth, Acorns invests your money in one of five pre-built portfolios that range from cautious to aggressive.
These portfolios are constructed using a weighted combination of exchange-traded funds, or ETFs.
The platform chooses these ETFs and automatically balances them based on how well they match the portfolio’s risk and growth management approach.
The simple premise of Acorns is that modest efforts can significantly impact over time. Yet Acorns only provides a platform with very few features to accomplish this. Investors cannot choose individual investments or even asset classes.
Your funds are committed to the automatically managed portfolio you choose, which only makes ETF investments.
Acorns are now more of a financial management tool than an investment tool. While users searching for assistance managing savings and investments may find much to offer, users hoping to manage their portfolio or make active investing decisions will likely be disappointed.
A trading platform centered on its app is called Robinhood (although it also offers a web presence). It has few features and is designed for simplicity of use.
Users can trade a few of the most well-liked financial instruments with Robinhood, including stocks, options, exchange-traded funds, and American depositary receipts (ADRs). Recently, this option was expanded to include cryptocurrencies through a component of Robinhood called Robinhood Crypto.
A limited number of investment management tools are available on this. A limited amount of information about each asset is displayed, including pricing history, trade volume, and other relevant statistics and buying data.
You can rapidly look up similar items to invest in because assets are grouped by market sector (for example, stocks in the technology industry).
Customers can invest quickly and easily by making purchases using funds added to their Robinhood accounts or by selling assets and reinvesting the proceeds in their accounts.
The simplicity of usage is Robinhood’s greatest asset and its biggest flaw. There are few complex tools or technical analyses on the investment site.
Only five years of pricing history are provided, and more intricate tools like bar charts are unavailable. As a result, some of the more complicated mechanisms that would turn off prospective investors are avoided, making the platform simple to understand.
Yet, it severely restricts the platform’s capabilities, leaving advanced investors few options.
Conclusion
Both appear to be geared toward younger, technologically nativist users. Using Robinhood is less expensive.
While Robinhood is an easy-to-use but feature-constrained trading platform, Acorns is an automatic investor and advisor, making it more appealing to less active investors. Both solely provide users with an email support option.
