But have venues like Robinhood made it too risky for inexperienced investors.

With so many people stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic, millions of Americans have turned to stock investing in recent months, lured by the advent of free trades.

Users get a free share of stock when they sign up, and if you can't afford to buy a share of an expensive stock like Apple or Tesla, Robinhood lets you buy a fraction of one.

Prester has her students play a simulated stock market game with fake cash and has seen firsthand how heady trading can be for them.

In fact, apps such as Robinhood may be even riskier than gambling because they allow users to engage in margin trading, a form of investing using borrowed money that can quickly lead to steep losses, critics say.

"It is not lost upon us that our company and our service have become synonymous with retail investing in America, and that this has led to millions of new investors making their first investments through Robinhood," Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, the company's co-founders, said in a statement.

Because Robinhood was designed to be easy to use, it's demystifying the investment world and opening up Wall Street to inexperienced investors, the company says.

But he's also a defender of Robinhood, saying it's democratizing stock trading.

drawn millions of new people into the market," he says