How to Transfer Your Brokerage Account From RobinHood to Fidelity 🏔

If you are a RobinHood user looking to switch over to Fidelity, this article will hopefully be of some use to you. It assumes you have a RobinHood brokerage account AND a Fidelity individual brokerage account. If you have not yet set up your Fidelity account, go call them up, get set up, and then come back here. In case it needs to be said, no part of this article should be considered as financial, investment, or life advice.

In the /r/WallStreetBets mania that happened over the Covid-19 pandemic ($GME, et al.), RobinHood gained thousands of new customers for its easy and simple interface which made market trading accessible to new investors. There’s been some cool-down in the market hype, and some RobinHood users have stopped checking their portfolios daily. Some, however, have decided to become even more serious investors, and they’re now finding that RobinHood doesn’t meet all the complex needs of a modern investor. A lot of people want to leave RobinHood and move to a more robust trading platform. If you’re also a Fidelity customer, here’s how to do it.

Robinhood supports partial as well as full account transfers. This article assumes you want to do a full account transfer and move all your assets from Robinhood to Fidelity. You should be aware that, as noted in their help docs, Robinhood charges a $75 fee for any account transfers. If you do not have $75 in cash in your account, a portion of your equities may be liquidated to pay the fee. In some cases, people have reported being able to call Fidelity, and get this fee reimbursed after transfer.

To get started, you’ll need your Robinhood account number. Assuming you have an account in good standing, log into your Fidelity account, look under the “Accounts and Trade” navigation dropdown, and select the “Transfers” option.

From there, scroll down and click the “Start a transfer” button to begin a new transfer.

Find RobinHood in the list by searching “Robinhood” and select “Robinhood Securities, LLC” from the list.

From there, just enter your account number and select “Individual” as your account type. In Robinhood, you might notice that when you go to your Account Settings, two account numbers are listed. You want to use the RHS format.

Submit all the info on the next page and then wait a couple days while Fidelity contacts RobinHood and begins the transfer. In a few days you’ll see your positions move over. Note that you might not see all your positions transfer at the same time, you might see them duplicated in both accounts, or you may see some fractional shares left behind in your RobinHood account. This can happen if you have dividend reinvestment enabled and a dividend payout has recently occurred on your account.

Also be aware that your cost basis information will not immediately transfer. Different people have reported different wait times for this info, but it generally will come over eventually and show up in your Fidelity account. In my case, it took almost two weeks, so be patient. If the data never comes over, you do have the option to manually set cost basis information on your positions, but I would advise against it. I recommend that you contact Fidelity to see if they can help if you still don’t see this data after a couple weeks.

From here, you should be set up with your new Fidelity account and ready to trade. Note that all RobinHood accounts are margin accounts, so even if you have a cash-only brokerage account with Fidelity, all your transferred positions will be shown as being on margin. You can call Fidelity and have them disable margin trading on your brokerage account, which I recommend, but is a personal choice for each investor to make on their own. You will need to call Fidelity support and have them convert your RobinHood-transferred margin positions to cash if you prefer to maintain only a cash trading account. The good news is that while RobinHood support is hard to reach and relatively unhelpful (in my experience), Fidelity support is top-tier. The hold times can be long, but they’re always very helpful once you reach them.

Happy investing!