Yes margin trading is available elsewhere but only on Robinhood is it so easy. Setting it up on Scottrade or what have you is difficult and has a lot of hoops to run through. On your phone it really feels like "not a big deal", so a lot more young, inexperienced ordinary people can get sucked into it.
> margin trading is available elsewhere but only on Robinhood is it so easy
What part of it is hard on eTrade or ThinkOrSwim? It's almost literally the same process.
The only difference is RobinHood is scooping up all of the people who are new to stock trading and the others aren't. Those same people would be offered the same margin on any other platform.
You sound like someone who has never set up a margin account. General margin accounts are almost no questions, and varying levels of options trading only ask you questions like "how many years have you traded options", with no verification. There's basically 0 barrier to entry except for having money to trade.
The only difference is that Robinhood is charging a subscription for access to margin whereas other brokerages do it for free.
Margin trading is not any easier on Robinhood than any other major brokerage platform. They all make it pretty trivial to trade on margin. Scottrade makes you sign a form saying you understand what you're doing, that's about it (I'm sure Robinhood has the same requirement).
