https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3vm79/robinhood-the-gamification-of-investing-and-a-is-creating-a-new-type-of-economic-inscrutability

Investing with Robinhood is more popular than ever, especially with young people and new investors. The brokerage platform has grown from 10 to 13 million users in 2020, many of whom are first-time traders. As the pandemic continues to wreak economic havoc, the possibility of making quick gains on the market is all the more appealing to younger people. With a median age of 31, the typical Robinhood customer is as interested in short-term cash flows as they are in long-term planning. 

Robinhood was inspired by economic crises in the first place. According to the Wall Street Journal, founders Baiju Bhatt and Vladimir Tenev came up with the concept in 2011, during the heyday of Occupy Wall Street. At the time, the best friends developed algorithmic trading tools for hedge funds in New York City. As they explained, Occupy alerted them to the moral hazards of their work. The pair decided to return to California, where they’d met years earlier at Stanford University. After a successful venture capital campaign, they launched a startup designed to “democratize finance,” a goal which is codified in the Robinhood mission statement. Specifically, they envisioned an app that would cut trading costs to zero. It was a renegade idea: at the start of the 2010s, most online brokerages charged $5-$10 dollars per transaction. When nearly a million people pre-registered for accounts, it was obvious that they’d tapped into a new market. All of a sudden, buying stocks was as easy as paying with Venmo, and the world of investing would never be the same.