Robinhood Launches a Stock Lending Feature
It could earn you some passive income.
Robinhood expects its new stock lending feature to roll out to everyone by the end of May.
The stock-trading app Robinhood on Wednesday introduced an optional stock lending feature that lets Robinhood lend out fully paid stocks in your portfolio. It can serve as a passive income source.
"We're excited to break down yet another barrier and democratize a product that has been historically preserved for the wealthy with high barriers to entry," Steve Quirk, Robinhood's chief brokerage officer, said in a statement.
You can disable the feature at any time, Robinhood said, and you can still sell shares on loan. Robinhood anticipates that the feature will have rolled out to all customers by the end of the month.
Earlier this month, the app finished rolling out cryptocurrency wallets to all of the eligible users on its waitlist of more than 2 million people. The financial services company started offering up the wallets to beta testers back in January. With the wallets, customers can move cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ether and litecoin between Robinhood and external wallets.
Robinhood, which reportedly had 15.9 million monthly active users in March, has faced scrutiny for "gamifying investing" and for its role in last year's GameStop stock frenzy. The company was ordered to pay $70M in fines and restitution last June for violating regulations and showing customers false and misleading information. Months later, a data breach exposed information of more than 7 million Robinhood customers.