Robinhood’s Game-Changing New Service Supercharges Social-Minded Retail Traders

Robinhood just dropped its latest weapon for retail traders—and it's all about community power.

Social Trading Revolution

The platform's new service connects traders directly, letting them share strategies, mirror moves, and collectively navigate markets without traditional gatekeepers. No more relying solely on institutional wisdom—or lack thereof.

Democratizing Finance, One Trade at a Time

By leveraging social dynamics, Robinhood cuts through complex jargon and bypasses old-school brokerage barriers. It’s trading, but with your squad calling the shots—finally, Wall Street meets Main Street on equal footing.

Because who needs a finance degree when you’ve got a solid Discord group and a knack for trend-spotting? Just remember: past performance doesn’t guarantee future results—but hey, neither does a Goldman Sachs resume.

Key Takeaways

• Retail investors are increasingly being armed with tools for finding and sharing investment ideas and making them go viral.
• Robinhood's new "Social" feature is the most recent example of fintechs and trading platforms catering to the new kids on the block, offering tools for discussing strategy with other traders and following peers' moves.
• "Retail recognizes that there's power in community and numbers," StockTwits' Tom Bruni said.

Retail investors think they can beat the market if they work together. Companies increasingly want to help them do it.

Chronically online digital natives are living their financial lives out in the open—and they believe doing so can boost their portfolios. Traders accustomed to public Venmo ledgers are flexing paper gains on TikTok and swapping stock picks on Reddit and X, investing tactics far more socialized than those of the moneyed folks of the past.

Fintech apps and trading platforms are increasingly catering to that group, integrating the social experience into customer experiences with tools that seek to quantify how people feel about stocks or track where attention is flowing. The latest rollout: Robinhood (HOOD) Social, announced at an event last night, which the company said will let traders discuss strategy and follow each others' transactions in real time.

"Oftentimes a finely-tuned machine can make all the difference," Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said at the event. "And that's the role that we feel Robinhood plays for our active traders."

'No More Second-Guessing What's Real and What Isn't'

"Retail recognizes that there's power in community and numbers," Tom Bruni, head of markets and retail investor insights at StockTwits, told Investopedia. "They're leveraging the power of community to understand the environment and investment before they make decisions."

Sometimes that results in mooning meme stocks like Gamestop (GME) and AMC (AMC) or, more recently, OpenDoor (DOOR), Kohl's (KSS), and American Eagle Outfitters (AEO). But the investors once viewed as "dumb money" are taking a bigger share of trading volumes and driving other market participants to take them seriously.

Last year, the share of 25-year-olds that used investment accounts was nearly 40%; in 2015, it was 6%, according to JPMorganChase. Retail investing flows have jumped roughly 50 percent from 2023 to early 2025 to levels "rivaling" the pandemic peak, the firm said in a recent report.

It's not just trading platforms that are seeking to serve retail investors. StockTwits, which caters to active traders and claims more than 10 million users, illustrates where attention is flowing in real time, showing what symbols are "trending."

Edwin Dorsey, the author of the BearCave newsletter who bets his money on the demise of micro-cap stocks, recently launched a web tool tracking stock promotions, which he said is meant to arm retail investors against companies that pay promoters to get their attention.

Robinhood Social will let users track other verified traders from the moment they open a position to when they exit. "No more second-guessing what's real and what isn't," the company said in its press release announcing the feature. Robinhood's trading app will show traders' daily and one-year profits and losses, letting retail investors track peers' performance like that of star fund managers returns.

"Robinhood and some of the other platforms out there are building a kind of full-service solution for people that wasn't necessarily needed five or 10 years ago," StockTwits' Bruni said.