Oh, I didn't want to address that because I wasn't sure if the person above was generically referring to all ETFs and ETNs as "index funds", when I was specifically responding to someone who was suggesting that they were using Robinhood for buy-and-hold index investing, buying things like S&P 500 etfs (eg. SPY, VOO, IVV). I was trying to think of what investment-quality ETFs Vanguard might not offer. Leveraged ETNs (TQQQ, DRIP, SPXS, etc.), commodity futures ETNs, and volatility products (e.g. SVXY) may not be offered by Vanguard (I'm not sure, actually), but these products are !!!not!!! buy-and-hold investments which, again, was what I was responding to.

[Anecdotally, someone on r/tradexiv or r/tradevol or somewhere on Reddit had a post about their Vanguard advisor cautioning them about buying XIV earlier in the year, telling them, more or less, "you're either exposing yourself to a lot of risk, or you're too smart to be trading with Vanguard" ...... he was not, it turned out, too smart.]

My claim was that RH should not be where you have money that you use for long-term buy-and-hold investment, even outside of an IRA. I think using RH for speculative investment is fine(-ish) if you accept that their order execution is poor (you don't really see this until you get into options), the company has severe product issues (e.g. the options order error the other day causing them to halt all options trading), and the company is not very well established (so there is a non-zero, greater than average, default risk).

I think it's undeniable that RH's UI is prettier than most other brokers. However, I think it's obvious that "prettier" and "better" are not necessarily the same thing. Again, if you are a buy-and-hold investor (which, again, is what I was responding to), being able to make a quick trade is not important, since you should probably only rebalance your portfolio once a quarter (maybe monthly or biannually, depending on your level of engagement).

But specifically, RH's UI is deliberately minimalistic, to a degree that I think is starting to verge on dangerous. They only recently moved from spark lines to offering optional OHLC bars, and their charts have no axes, which makes it difficult to get a sense of the products price movements. RH doesn't show you historical OHLC data, or historical dividends (just yield). The app offers no stock screening. The charts offer no volume analysis, which makes it difficult to see whether or not you'll be able to exit a position. My mom (who thankfully understands that she should only put money she's willing to lose into RH) recently told me she entered into a position with some low-volume real estate company, and couldn't exit the position for some days due to lack of buyers. She was unaware of the liquidity of the product she was trading (and complained that RH should have warned her... but that's another story).

Even worse is their options platform. At minimum, it's useful to show the days-to-expiration when selecting the expiration date. The options platform deliberately hides important information, such as implied volatility (probably the most important figure for an options contract), Black-Scholes greeks, volume and open interest, and a probability of profit estimate, behind an unlabeled corner button after you've selected an option to purchase. RH introduced multi-leg orders over the summer, but these still don't really give you the tools you need to construct strategies like spreads, calendars, straddles, strangles, condors, and butterflies. These are fairly complex trades with non-linear responses to spot and volatility changes, but RH won't even show you your net position delta before placing a trade (it will show it to you after you've entered a position). If you want to see what a real options trading platform looks like, you can demo ThinkorSwim or Tastyworks. Yes, it's more complicated, but that's because it's necessary.

So no, I disagree with the claim that RH's UI is "100x better". I think it's UI is maybe "50x prettier", but I don't think it's "better" for the user (and I've seen some wretched UIs, like Ameritas). In options trading, I think that RH's interface is objectively worse than those offered by other platform. Unlike checking and savings, which are generally regarded as low-risk activities, I think that RH's UI is deliberately designed to encourage risky behavior, and minimize "information overload" (in favor of "blissful ignorance") in what is inherently a risky activity for which most customers are not adequately prepared, under the thin guise of "democratization" (hence its beeline from stock investing (risky) to stock investing on margin (riskier) to cryptocurrency meme investing (extremely risky, and launched during peak bubble) to options trading (extinction-level-event risky for novices)).