Dough Review – How Does This Commission-Free Brokerage Measure Up?

About Dough

Dough is a commission-free brokerage with a lot of similarities to the better-known Robinhood. It’s only available as a mobile app and is extremely light on technical data and charts. But, it offers a handful of discovery and social features, including the ability to favorite stocks from market sectors you’re interested in. Dough also displays analyst ratings for individual stocks and gives a brief explainer of why a stock’s price is changing, which novice traders may find useful.

Dough Pricing Options

Dough offers truly commission-free trading on US stocks and ETFs. There are also no fees for transferring money to or from the platform via ACH transfer. You may incur fees if you need paper statements, and wire transfers cost $30. Note that real-time price data is only available to unfunded accounts for 15 days after account opening.

Dough Features

Commission-free Trading

The number one reason to use Dough is that it offers commission-free trades. You’re limited to US stocks and ETFs, but the range of offerings is pretty wide – most OTC stocks are listed on Dough. The platform also allows margin trading if you have at least $2,000 in your account. However, there is currently no options trading on Dough.

It’s important to note that your order options are limited with this brokerage. You can place limit orders, but not stop losses. So, you’ll need to monitor your stocks closely or else use Dough primarily for buy-and-hold strategies.

Stock Data

The Dough app caters to beginner traders who don’t want to look through technical charts. Instead, the app offers simplified line charts that give you a relatively vague idea of a stock’s price history. This is aesthetically pleasing, but it leaves a lot to be desired if you’re using Dough to figure out when to place trades.

That said, you can get some more detailed information about individual stocks. Every stock includes a table of fundamental information, including market cap, year-to-date gain/loss, and average trading volume. You can also see where a stock’s price is relative to its intraday range and annual range.

Dough also offers a breakdown of analyst ratings of a stock. At a glance, you can see whether analysts generally offer a buy, sell, or hold rating for a stock. The “Report Card,” as Dough calls this information, also includes bar charts showing earnings over the past four quarters, income, revenue, debt, and cash. However, you won’t find a stock’s P/E ratio or more actionable fundamental metrics.

One of the most useful and unique things about the information that Dough provides about individual stocks is the analysis of why a stock’s price is moving. Often, this is related to why the broader market is experiencing a price swing. But, for traders who aren’t plugged into market news and financial disclosure reports, this brief blurb included with every stock can be extremely helpful.

Finally, Dough includes a basic news feed for every stock. Strangely, there’s no news feed for the app overall, so you do have to navigate to an individual stock page to find stories. Most of the news is pulled from well-known free sources, such as Yahoo! Finance, Benzinga, and MarketWatch. 

Idea Feed

Another unique part of the Dough app is the Idea Feed, which appears on the app’s homepage. Here, you’ll find the 3Cap, a daily three-minute video from the team behind Dough that summarizes the big market news of the day. This is another useful feature for traders who aren’t watching the market throughout the day, although it’s also available on YouTube even if you don’t use Dough as your brokerage.

The Idea Feed also draws on your own interests. When you sign up for a Dough account, you can choose up to three market sectors that you’re interested in. The feed will then notify you about stocks within these sectors that are making big moves or will surface potentially interesting news articles.

The feed also has some broad categories, such as Biggest Gainers and Biggest Losers. These are useful, especially considering that all of these stocks come with short explanations about why they are experiencing big moves.

Favorites

The Favorites section of the Dough app serves essentially as a watchlist. It comes prepopulated with a selection of popular stocks and stocks from the market sectors you selected as interests. However, it’s fully customizable and it’s easy to add new stocks to your Favorites list as you use the app. 

Customization and Layout

Dough is only available as a mobile app for iOS and Android. There’s no desktop interface for this platform. For some traders, that may be no problem at all. But, if you’re using an alternative tool for more in-depth research or technical charting, it can be somewhat annoying to go back and forth between your computer and phone.

The layout of the Dough app is very simple. Most of the information you need is contained on the homepage, as there are no tabs for navigating through the platform. To save space, a lot of information – such as the Idea Feed – is organized into horizontal carousels that you can swipe through as desired. On individual stocks pages, fundamental data is collapsed by default so you can quickly find the information you want without having to scroll all that far. 

The most notable customization you can make to Dough is selecting your market sectors of interest. Sectors are somewhat specific – for example, there are “Cars,” “Airlines,” “Beverages,” and “Ecommerce.” You’re allowed to choose up to three, and the Idea Feed will then surface stocks and news related to these interests. However, once you select interests, there’s no way to change them later.

Dough Platform Differentiators

So, how does Dough compare to other brokers? Given that Dough isn’t the only commission-free brokerage available, the main thing that differentiates this platform is offering information for traders who only check into the market on occasion. The Idea Feed allows investors to find trading ideas about stocks that match up with their interests, without diving deep into technical information. Likewise, the explanations of why a stock is moving are extremely useful for traders who don’t follow the market closely, but want to be informed when they do look at price data. Along the same lines, the inclusion of analyst ratings with each stock can help novice traders make decisions about buying and selling.

What Type of Trader is Dough Best For?

Dough was built for beginner traders who want to invest in stocks that interest them. The platform provides just enough information to give users the ability to which companies are worth investing in. But, the absence of even basic technical charts and advanced fundamental data makes this platform largely unusable for serious stock research. While advanced traders could take advantage of Dough simply as a commission-free brokerage, not being able to place stop loss orders is also a serious drawback.

Pros

• Commission-free stock and ETF trades
• Stock pages include analyst ratings
• Explanations of why stock prices are moving
• Idea feed offers simple way to find new stocks to trade
• Simple, user-friendly interface

Cons

• Charts are extremely basic line plots
• No options trading, mutual funds, or foreign stocks