Trade Stocks Commission Free with Robinhood

It used to be 9.95 per trade, then 8, and now 4.95. Commissions can add up and suck the profitability out of your stock portfolio, especially if you want to make multiple trades per year or had in mind to trade in smaller batches of shares.

Robinhood has leveled the playing field with $0 commissions on trades. You can check out Robinhood at https://robinhood.com from your smartphone to sign up. You can also ask someone who already has Robinhood to give you a referral link and you both will receive a free share (usually of a cheap stock).

I personally like using Robinhood the most for option trades, where commissions really eat into my profitability especially if the options only cost under $100. The tools to research are missing from Robinhood so you will have to find some other tool to do your stock research before trading. Regarding the tools I like Fidelity and Charles Schwab better.

Good luck!

Activision Blizzard (ATVI) is a Good Buy

What’s Going On?

Activision Blizzard came out with their Q1 2018 earning reports exceeding estimates by over 10%. Despite Fortnite and PUBG claiming much gaming market share over that same period, it appears it hasn’t pushed people into abandoning their World of Warcraft subscriptions or uninstalling Call of Duty.

I’ve been a long time holder of this company, and do not plan on selling anytime soon. Even though the dividend rate is on the low side (34 cents this past quarter), their revenue climbed over 13% for the same quarter last year.

Potential trades:

Write (Sell) put option for June 22 at $70.5 dollars per share at $2.00 per option. As long as ATVI does not go below $68.5 by June 22, 2018 you will be better off for it. If the price goes below that point then you will be forced to buy shares at that price, which I still think is a good thing long term. Otherwise, I’d put this stock on a watchlist and buy long if the shares go under $69. With the volatile stock market of the past few months this will probably happen and give you a nice discount on a great company.

Current trading price of ATVI: $71.66

Other Thoughts

While EA Games is also a profitable company which looks good on paper, as a gamer myself I’d have to say that EA has thrown many gamers under the bus with their pay as you go, or pay for item strategy. It’s hard to imagine the frustration seeing items for sale in a game after you’ve already paid between $60 to $80 for a AAA game. EA Games helped create the in-game content purchase model, which unfortunately has spilt to other developers.