Does Robinhood Have paper Trading Accounts? (Late-2021)
Paper Trading is an important tool for new traders and investors who don’t yet have the capital, knowledge, or confidence to step into the market with real money right off the bat.
Generally it’s a good idea to get a grasp on your skills as a trader for many months, or even a few years if you’re really risk-adverse and aren’t confident enough to put your capital in situations where it can evaporate if markets turn against you.
In this article we’ll cover if Robinhood offers Paper Trading Accounts (Spoiler Alert: No) and alternatives that you can use for paper-trading until they offer Paper-Trading Accounts.
Does Robinhood Offer Paper Trading?
Unfortunately, as we spoiled above, Robinhood doesn’t offer Paper-trading Accounts currently. They haven’t announced if they’ll ever introduce this feature, so we can’t say if they’ll ever have paper trading. But there’s some other great investment apps out there that offer paper-trading — our favorite alternative being Webull. We’ll go over a few of our favorite alternatives below though.
Best Robinhood Paper-Trading Alternatives:
Since Robinhood has yet to release an option to paper-trade on their platform we’ll cover our favorite alternatives — unfortunately there’s not many good alternatives on mobile however, as papertrading doesn’t let brokers earn money from cash deposits or commissions and thus few offer paper trading accounts at all.
Our Top Choice: Webull's Paper-Trading Account
Webull is the best app for realistic paper trading in our opinion as it has a much simpler interface compared to other paper-trading apps and is very easy to open. In fact you don’t even have to open an account with Webull to start paper-trading with them — simply download the webull app and you can start paper-trading after selecting the option in the app’s menu.
We’d still recommend opening a Webull account though — as much like Robinhood they offer 1-2 free stocks that can be valued up to $1000+, but generally comes out to a free $20~ or so just for depositing $100 or more into their brokerage.
Webull offers paper-trading of traditional stocks and Equities, including essentially everything Robinhood offers on their normal brokerage accounts. They don’t offer paper-trading of options though as they’re not liquid enough to actually accurately paper-trade — as a result they decided not to include them as an option.
An Okay Choice: TdAmeritrade's Paper-Trading Account
If for whatever reason you don’t want to paper-trade with Webull — TdAmeritrade offers paper-trading as well, including futures/fx paper-trading, which Webull does not allow/include (since it’s not reliable and gives false results).
The account is free — much like Webull, but they don’t offer a signup bonus and you must actually go through all the process and documentation of opening a full-service brokerage account to begin paper-trading. Because of this, we’d recommend using the Webull app and just opening an account with them instead of TdAmeritrade.
The reason we recommend Webull over TdAmeritrade for papertrading is it’s mobile app is — in our opinion — more user-friendly and simple to use, not to mention opening an account isn’t even necessary and is much easier if you do open an account with them.
