When you invest within your IRA (Individual Retirement Account), any gains you make is tax-deferred. So you can keep investing your money without paying the IRS until you start withdrawing from it in retirement.

But Robinhood doesn’t provide an option to trade within your IRA. Whatever you gain is taxed in the year when you realize those gains. So you can only reinvest some of your realized gains using Robinhood.

That’s what Jen Quraishi Phillips conveyed.

Having said that, here’s my additional take on the subject:

Whether capital growth using tax-deferred treatment in an IRA is better than paying taxes up front really depends on your tax bracket at the time you are realizing gains from your trades vs. what tax bracket you will eventually be in when you do retire and take distributions.