The US start-up letting investors trade without paying commission

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Look, no commissions

Brokerage fees can end up taking a significant chunk from your returns. Robinhood, a US start-up, gives investors the opportunity to trade online commission free. The company plans to roll out an Australian trading platform later in the year. It claims that by cutting back on physical branches and expensive advertising space, it can provide free financial services.

Robinhood plans to offer margin accounts in the near future and more asset classes, which it hopes will attract a wider range of investors. At present the app is only available in the US and trades in American equities and exchange traded funds.

robinhood start up lets investors trade without brokerage

One Touch and they're off

Thanks to the internet, you can now launch a start-up in just a few minutes. In May, PayPal and e-commerce platform Bigcommerce announced their collaboration, where all 90,000 of Bigcommerce's clients have access to PayPal's One Touch technology for web and mobile.

With the new collaboration, creating a start-up will be almost as easy as designing a WordPress website: you can choose from a range of templates and phone apps, integrate your platform with PayPal's once-click payment system, and access SEO (search engine optimisation) and marketing tools to help you design a business strategy.

Property insights

If you're buying a property, either as a home or investment, you're probably having a hard time. Prices in Sydney and Melbourne have soared, and making a well-informed decision can be challenging and costly. But with RP Data's new Property Value guide - covering 98% of the market - you can now access intensive market data.

From July 3, would-be property moguls can access the Property Value guide via a variety of subscriptions. More detailed than RP Data's free service, it gives access to reports estimating yields and rents, based on transaction history. These figures can be compared with those of other properties, so you can see where you're likely to be better off. For $50, you can access Property Value for a week.

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Steph Nash was a staff writer at Money until 2017.