Robinhood, the online brokerage aimed at individual investors, is launching Robinhood Social, which will allow users to follow each other’s profits and losses and feature public figure profiles. Membership will initially be extended to select Robinhood customers, starting early next year, with broader availability to follow. Robinhood says the move is based on feedback from active traders who say they rely heavily on social media to navigate the markets. Since it can be challenging to differentiate between legitimate posts and sponsored message or misinformation, Robinhood Social aims to make the process more transparent, according to the company.

The 12-year-old company has brushed up against similar controversy. In 2020 it agreed without admitting guilt to a $65 million settlement with the SEC, which accused the company of misleading customers.

But its novel fee structure — charging companies a fee to trade against its member base rather than taking a cut from user transactions — has made it enormously popular with individual investors and a success on Wall Street. It has nearly 11 million active users, joined the S&P 500 Index this month, and is valued at about  $100 billion.

Providing a platform in which authenticated traders can speak directly to each other certainly seems a credible attempt at transparency. Robinhood Social will let traders post trades, follow each other, swap strategies and discuss market moves, the company explains in a news release.

Users will also be able to “track the market moves of public figures like Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,” reports The Wall Street Journal, which says the social platform will roll out in beta in Q1 2026 to about 10,000 users as part of the Robinhood mobile app.

“Posted trades will be verified, and investors can see when a post’s author entered and exited a position,” WSJ writes, explaining that users “will be able to click on the symbol in a post to initiate a trade.”

By allowing users to tag and follow figures of their choice, the app will allow users “to follow and manually replicate the trades of prominent investors,” observes TechCrunch, which calls this “copy trading,” an model that companies such as eToro and Dub have built their businesses around.

Bloomberg notes Robinhood Social will compete for discussion action with “Reddit and its WallStreetBets section.”

“The launch comes at a time when the regulatory landscape is fast evolving,” writes TechCrunch. “Numerous crypto companies have become publicly traded” in recent months while “copy trading — long common in Europe but heavily restricted in the U.S. — may be gaining acceptance finally.”