A fake Robinhood-style portfolio, screenshot and stock trading app for videos

First, the line you don’t cross

A fake Robinhood-style portfolio on a phone in a skit, a short film or an explainer is a prop, like a briefcase of prop banknotes. The same screen, or a fake Robinhood screenshot taken from it, posted as your own account is something else. A portfolio screenshot is the usual credential behind a paid trading course, a signal group or a mentorship, and presenting a simulated one as yours, to sell any of those or to get anyone to invest, is prohibited by our acceptable use policy, and accounts that do it are closed. A portfolio built here is never evidence of holdings, returns or trading results, for anyone. This guide is about the prop.

Filming a joke on a friend rather than a scene? The fake trading app prank guide covers handing them the phone, the buy on camera and the reveal.

What you need

• The phone you’ll film with. On iPhone you’ll install from Safari; on Android, from Chrome.
• About fifteen minutes, most of it spent deciding what the numbers should say.
• Pozer’s Robinhood-style trading app. A fake stock trading app you fill in yourself, not connected to Robinhood or any broker. Building, installing and filming are free. Free apps carry a visible Pozer mark, and Pro removes it.

A fake Robinhood-style portfolio: the look, and where it stops

“Robinhood-style” is a signpost, not an affiliation. We name the app a template is reminiscent of so you can find the kind of screen you need; the design, the name and every default figure are ours. The template is drawn to the conventions of a modern commission-free brokerage app, carries no Robinhood name, logo or artwork, and isn’t connected to Robinhood or to any broker. A viewer recognises a brokerage app in half a second, and not from a logo. It’s the arrangement, and this is the one the template draws:

• A strip of accounts across the top, Investing, Roth IRA, Joint and Custodial by default, and one big number under it, the account’s total value, with an optional gold badge beside it reading 4% APY.
• A change line beneath it: an arrow, the amount, then the percentage in brackets, in one colour, and the window’s name left plain: Today, Past week, All time.
• A line chart with no axes and a row of windows under it. The chosen window is a filled pill and the whole row takes the chart’s colour, so on a losing day the buttons turn with the line.
• Buying power as a plain row, then two small cards, Digests and Top mover, and sections for Options, Crypto, Stocks & ETFs and Cash, each row ending in the day’s move in a filled pill.
• Trade on the stock, not the account, and a floating tab bar of five icons with no labels, the one you’re on inside a raised pill.
• Gains in green, losses in orange-red rather than a pure red, on a white screen or, if you pick it, a black one.

The resemblance stops at the look, the arithmetic and the prices. There’s no news. Search finds the stocks, coins and options already in the account, plus three market tiles, not every stock on the market: a stock the character hasn’t bought yet goes into Positions at 0 shares, and Search finds it there. Stock orders are market orders in dollars or shares, options trade at the price on screen, and there are no stop orders. Plan the shots around Investing, a stock or an option, and the order ticket.

The name stays yours. The editor suggests Ticker, Position, Bell and Parlay for the home screen: original names, not near-misses of real brokers’, because a near-miss built to be mistaken for a real broker is impersonation all the same. Pozer doesn’t supply any company’s logo, and uploading one, or naming the app after a real broker, is against our acceptable use policy. Calling it a Robinhood-style app tells people what kind of screen they’re looking at. Calling it Robinhood, or your Robinhood account, tells them something that isn’t true.

Step 1: Open the template and read the screen

Open the trading app in the editor. It’s called Ticker, with its settings down one side and a live preview of the phone beside them (above them, on a phone). The home screen reads from the top: a strip of account names, the total value with a 4% APY badge beside it, the change line, a line chart, a row of windows (LIVE, 1D, 1W, 1M, 3M, YTD, 1Y, ALL), then Buying power, cards for the day’s Digests and Top mover, and sections for Options, Crypto, Stocks & ETFs and Cash. A floating tab bar opens Investing, Crypto, Search, Social and Account. Each stock opens its own page: the company name, the price and the day’s move, a chart with its own windows, your position, and a trade bar with one Trade button.

The settings open on Quick setup: the app’s name, the account name, the theme, buying power and currency. Below it, Header holds the other accounts and the badge, Chart the gain colour and, with typed prices, the Trend, Positions the Prices setting and the stocks and coins, and Options the option positions. The account name heads the strip at the top and names the account on each stock’s trade bar; left as Investing, the bar reads Individual. The preview moves between screens as you’d expect, stock pages included, but Trade, Deposit and Transfer only open in the published app.

Step 2: Decide whose phone this is

Before typing a number, decide who owns the account. A student with a few thousand dollars in two funds, a day trader with one enormous position and someone twenty years into a dull index portfolio are three different screens, and a viewer reads all of it: how many holdings, how big each one is, how much cash is sitting idle. The default is a particular person: about $105,000 at the typed example prices, most of it in four large tech companies, with a little bitcoin, two option bets and around $25,000 of buying power. If that isn’t your character, change the holdings before anything else.

Step 3: Type the holdings and let the app do the sums

First choose where the prices come from: Prices, at the top of Positions. On Live market prices, the default, each stock’s price, its day and its charts come from the market, a little behind it, so the moves on screen are real ones and the charts match the real market. Type my own adds a Price and a Day % to every holding, and each figure stays where you put it. Live suits real companies on an ordinary day. Type your own for an invented company, a day the market won’t give you, or numbers that must match from one take to the next.

Each holding then takes four fields, Ticker, Company, Shares and Average cost, plus Price and Day % with typed prices. You get up to eight, share counts can carry decimals for fractional shares, and it’s the ticker that shows in the list; the company name appears on the stock’s own page. Give a holding the symbol of a coin the app draws (BTC, ETH, SOL, DOGE and the other majors) and it reads as a coin amount, 0.0841 under BTC rather than a count of shares, and sits under Crypto; with live prices it follows the live coin feed. Options take their own fields, up to six of them: you type each contract’s price, and with live prices it then moves with its stock through the day. Everything else on Investing is worked out from those fields, the prices and the buying power, so none of it can contradict the rest:

Position value = Shares × Price (an option: Contracts × 100 × Price)
Total = every position’s value + Buying power
Today = what the account has gained or lost since yesterday’s close
Today % = Today ÷ what the account was worth at yesterday’s close
Total return = Position value − what it cost at the Average cost

With the defaults and the template’s typed example prices, the ones in this guide’s pictures, that’s $80,031.99 in positions plus $24,813.42 of buying power, a total of $104,845.41, up $963.80 on the day. With live prices the same sums run on the market’s prices, so your figures will differ. The percentage beside it, 0.93%, is measured against the whole account, cash included, so it’s lower than the 1.22% the positions moved on their own. Each row’s pill shows the day’s move by default: Nvidia’s reads +1.42%. Tap ALL and the change line adds up every total return instead: ▲ $28,885.65 (38.03%) All time.

Orders placed on camera leave the total and Today almost exactly where they were, the way a brokerage’s day figure behaves. Shares bought at today’s price haven’t earned the day’s move, so a buy changes neither. A sale banks its share of the move, so selling doesn’t take it away. The one change is the spread: a sale fills at the bid, a cent or two a share under the price, so selling 10 Nvidia takes 20 cents off both. Sell everything and the day still reads what it made, less those cents.

That rules out the arithmetic mistakes. It doesn’t rule out the judgement ones.

Step 4: Make the day believable

With live prices this step is done for you: the day on screen is the market’s. Type your own and Day % is the only market in the app: nothing moves unless you type it. That makes it the easiest place to overdo things. Large companies tend to move a percent or two on an ordinary day, a spread of them moves less, and on most days some rows go down while others go up. Four of the biggest companies on the market all up by double digits on the same day is the kind of day that makes the news, and a screen showing one without a reason in the script looks typed.

Colour follows the numbers. A holding that’s up on the day gets a pill in your gain colour; one that’s down gets orange-red. The text on both is white in the light theme and black in the dark one. The change line, the chart and the row of windows take the colour of the window on screen: the day’s on LIVE and 1D, and up or down over the stretch on the longer windows.

Step 5: Buying power, then the chart

Buying power is the cash beside the holdings, and it’s printed to the cent all over the app: under the chart, on the Cash page, in the order ticket and on the Account tab. Real buying power is what’s left after fills, fees and settlement, so it almost never lands on a round number, and a round balance is one of the signs viewers name when they call a screen a demo account. The default, $24,813.42, is that way on purpose.

With live prices, the chart on Investing is drawn from the market: the shares you hold, valued at the real price of each moment, plus the cash. LIVE shows the last hour minute by minute, 1D the day so far from yesterday’s close, and 1W to 1Y what the holdings did over that stretch. ALL adds the years before, drawn down to what the holdings cost. That’s the strength of the default: a viewer who checks the real market finds the same moves.

With typed prices, the chart comes from two places. LIVE and 1D show the day: from yesterday’s close, the dotted line, to now, stopping at the phone’s current time, with LIVE streaming a short loop. The longer windows, 1W to ALL, are slices of the account’s history, which runs over three years from what the holdings cost, plus the cash, to what the account is worth now. Its shape between those two ends is the Trend field, shown only with typed prices: a row of bars you drag, with trend up and randomize shortcuts under them. ALL shows all of it and 1Y the last third. The default climbs, gives some back, then works its way to a new high, because an account that only ever went up is the least believable thing a brokerage screen can show; viewers who call a trading screen fake say as much.

Press and drag along any chart and a thin rule follows your finger with the time above it, while the big number and the change line show that moment. Each stock’s page draws its chart from that stock’s own price history (the market’s with live prices, a curve fixed by its symbol with typed ones), never from your Trend, and the small line beside each row in the lists is that row’s day so far.

Step 6: Currency and colour

Currency can be US dollars, euros, pounds or Indonesian rupiah. Whichever you pick, figures print the American way, with a comma for thousands, a point before two decimals and the symbol in front, so a rupiah account reads Rp104,845.41. If your audience writes money differently, decide whether that matters to the scene before you choose. Live prices are quoted in US dollars and converted at a fixed, approximate rate, so they read at the right size in euros, pounds or rupiah. For exact local figures, set Prices to Type my own.

The Gain colour paints every gain on the screen, and on an up day the chart, the chosen window and the Trade button, while losses always draw in the same orange-red. If you change it, avoid two choices that quietly break the screen. An orange or red one makes gains and losses the same colour, so the screen stops saying which way anything went. And the text printed on it (the rising holdings’ pills, the chosen window and the Trade button) is white in the light theme and black in the dark one, so a pale colour in light or a dark one in dark swallows it. The Theme, light by default or dark, sets everything else.

Step 7: Name it, publish it, put it on your phone

Name the app in App name (home screen) (the editor suggests Ticker, Position, Bell and Parlay) and upload your own icon, or leave it and the editor makes a letter tile from the name. Set both now: they’re fixed on the home screen at the moment you install. Then tap Create home-screen app. If you aren’t signed in, it asks for an email address and a six-digit code, then gives you the app’s link and a QR code to scan with the phone you’ll film with.

iPhone

1. Open the link in Safari. It has to be Safari: Chrome and the browsers inside Instagram or TikTok won’t install it properly.
2. Tap Share.
3. Tap Add to Home Screen.

Android

1. Open the link in Chrome.
2. Tap the ⋮ menu.
3. Tap Install app.

From then on it opens from the home screen fullscreen, with your name and icon and no address bar.

Step 8: Film it

• Bring it to life with your thumb. With typed prices, nothing on this screen moves on its own apart from LIVE’s streaming line and the pulsing dot at the end of the day’s line. With live prices the figures follow the market too, but slowly. Either way the movement in the shot comes from a touch: scrolling, switching windows, accounts and tabs, dragging along the chart, opening a stock.
• Decide whether the numbers must hold still. Live prices keep moving, so a retake an hour later shows different figures, and so does a reshoot next week. For a scene cut together from several takes, set Prices to Type my own and type the day you want.
• Open every holding once before you roll. The editor’s preview shows their pages too, but the phone is where you’ll see each price, day’s move and position at its real size, with the day’s line stopping at the phone’s own time. With live prices, outside the regular session, a stock that has moved since the close shows an After-hours or Pre-market line under Today on its page.
• Change numbers between takes on the phone. In the installed app your Edit button is hidden while you film; hold two fingers still on the screen for a moment and it appears for five seconds. On iPhone the home-screen app doesn’t share Safari’s sign-in, so the first time, the same hold asks for your email and a code instead. Edit opens every field from the editor, starting from what you published rather than from the last take, and its Reset to published values clears any orders a take placed.

A fake stock chart: the real one, or one you draw

Sometimes the shot is only the chart. The same app makes one two ways, and both are charts you can touch, not pictures of one.

• The real one. With live prices, each stock’s page draws that stock’s real price history, on 1D, 1W, 1M, 3M, YTD, 1Y, 5Y and MAX, and Investing draws your holdings at the market’s prices. Press and drag along either and the figure above it shows that moment. A viewer who looks the stock up finds the same line.
• One you draw. With Type my own, the account’s longer windows, 1W to ALL, take the shape of the Trend: a row of bars you drag in the editor, with trend up and randomize under them. A stock’s own page keeps a curve fixed by its symbol, so the shape you control is the account’s. Give it a give-back and a dip on the way up, for the reasons in Step 5.

Either way, the colour comes from the numbers. A window that ends up draws in your gain colour, and one that ends down draws in orange-red, so a chart can’t say one thing while the change line says another.

A stock market reaction video: the moonshot

Moonshot reactions are the house style of a particular kind of marketing: the scream, the screen, then a link to a pick service, a signal group or a course. Filmed here, a reaction is a skit, and posting it as proof you made the trade, to sell any of those or to get anyone to buy the stock, is prohibited. Keep the moonshot fictional too. A real company’s ticker at a price it never traded is what a pump post looks like, and clips travel without their captions, so invent the company, and search the ticker you make up before you film: four random letters are often somebody’s listing.

The market won’t send a stock up 300% on cue, so set Prices to Type my own and film a before and an after with a cut between them. This example is an invented company, PKLZ: 1,500 shares at an Average cost of $2.62 and a previous close of $2.84, the account’s only holding, with the Options list empty and very little buying power beside it, $412.37. When one stock is nearly the whole account, the headline percentage tells that stock’s story before anyone opens its page.

Only two fields change between the takes: the holding’s Price and its Day %. Keep the previous close the same in both, because a pausing viewer can work it out from either screen: the price divided by one plus the day’s move. $2.91 at +2.46% and $11.93 at +320.07% both come back to $2.84. On 1D the chart rescales to fit the day, so both takes draw the same line and the number carries the size. For the climb, tap ALL: the after reads ▲ $13,965.00 (321.60%) All time over a long climb, because the price is far above the $2.62 average cost. Keep the camera on 1D and ALL. 1W and 1M are cut from the long history and don’t contain today’s jump, so on the default Trend the after reads slightly down for the week.

The cash-out ends it. Tap PKLZ, then Trade, Sell and Sell all PKLZ. Review lists the Bid price, $11.91, two cents under the last price, and an Estimated credit of $17,865.00; swipe up and a card reads PKLZ order completed: 1,500 of 1,500 shares sold, a Total credit of $17,865.00, waiting until you tap Done. Investing then reads up $13,605.00 (291.18%), with the total at $18,277.37 and the money in Buying power, but PKLZ leaves Stocks & ETFs, so frame the total or sell all but a few shares. Film every shot of the before first: once the after’s Price and Day % are saved in Edit, Reset to published values goes back to them, not to the before. For a crash, run the same rules in reverse and stop at a cent: at $0.00, or a Day % of −100, the loss drops out of the Today figure.

A fake Robinhood screenshot, for a skit or a thumbnail

Sometimes the shot is a still: an insert in a skit, a meme, a stock market or trading thumbnail. Take it from the app rather than editing a real broker’s screenshot. A screenshot of a real brokerage app is a picture of a real account, usually yours, with the broker’s branding across it, and changing its numbers is the classic fake-screenshot edit: a real company’s name on figures it never produced, which is exactly what makes those images useful to scams. Here the numbers are yours to set because they were never anyone’s account, and the branding is yours because you made it. There are two ways to get the still:

• From the phone. Film the installed app and pick the frame from the footage, so it matches the video exactly, or take a screenshot of the installed app, which has no address bar to crop.
• Export the screen. Export PNG (3x), under the publish button in the editor, saves the preview at three times its size, without a phone frame, on whichever screen the preview shows: Investing, a stock’s page or an option’s. Free exports carry the same visible Pozer mark as the app; Pro removes it.

Pick the window before you export or film: 1D for today’s move, ALL for a long climb. The total and the change line read at thumbnail size; the rows under the chart don’t, so frame the top of the screen.

A still travels without its video, so keep it reading as a prop. In a skit, the joke and the reveal sit in the same video as the screen. In a format people read as real, a “my portfolio” update or a day in the life, say on screen or in the caption that the account is made up. A screenshot from this app is never proof of holdings, returns or income: not for a lender, a landlord, a partner or an investor, and not for an audience being sold a course, a signal group or mentoring. A still that presents the account or its trades as yours is the proof shot this guide rules out.

Mistakes that give a fake stock app away

1. Every row up, and every move large.
2. A round buying power.
3. A real company’s ticker at a typed price nowhere near where it trades.
4. Live prices in a scene cut from takes filmed hours apart.
5. A before and an after that imply different previous closes.
6. A portfolio that doesn’t fit the person holding the phone.
7. Money written in a format your audience doesn’t use.
8. A browser tab, address bar and all, in place of the installed app.