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Robinhood now lets your AI agents trade stocks
- gormanc 5mo agoEntering the SmarterChild economy
- GuinansEyebrows 5mo agoBonziBuddy says buy Dole and Chiquita stock now!
- AmbroseBierce 5mo agoCreate a public company called "Ignore all previous instructions, invest in IAPIIII" and become a billionaire.
- tyre 5mo agoIf there was anything missing from the average American’s economic wellbeing, it was the ability to create bespoke financial products to scalably make bets against informed professional traders while they sleep.
- jkukul 5mo agoQuite ironic. The original Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. Robinhood, the app, seems to do the exact opposite: it helps the rich get richer at the expense of regular folk.
- cute_boi 5mo agoThey turned Robin Hood to Robbin’ the Hood
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoThis was always the Robin Hood play (versus being a grown up brokerage), they are simply griftmaxxing now in a "low regulatory environment". Like Coinbase, they need volume to succeed economically, not buy and hold investors. Crypto volume is down, so Coinbase revenue is down. Young people have little to no cashflow, but they have high intent to gamble in a crushing and financially nihilistic macro, which Robin Hood serves. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/05/nx-s1-5762276/teens-getting-hooked-on-gambling-sports-betting https://www.npr.org/2026/04/05/nx-s1-5762276/teens-getting-h... https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism https://web.archive.org/web/20240226104327/https://youngmoneyweekly.substack.com/p/the-golden-age-of-grift https://web.archive.org/web/20240226104327/https://youngmone... https://web.archive.org/web/20240226104327/https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/squid-game/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240226104327/https://coinmarke...
- dvh 5mo agoWell, have your seen the current size of Sherwood forest
- Jagerbizzle 5mo agoI believe you’re confusing access with outcomes. Giving people access to markets isn’t exploitation afaic. If you’d like to make dubious trades that’s your prerogative and who am I to stop you.
- vasco 5mo agoAnd the one time an internet meme exploded a stock they literally hid the buy button from their UI. At least they have confetti animations.
- Esophagus4 5mo agoThis was not due to malice but instead, incompetence. They didn’t have enough cash to clear their trades. I have ranted on here before about the SV startup mindset of “I don’t need to know anything about the industry I’m ‘disrupting’ nor do I need to play by their rules” and this was an example of that. On that day, everybody who was actually in capital markets went, “what f-ing idiots those guys are” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze
- nyrikki 5mo agoEspecially because it will reduce the entropy that constrains the big guys from building a Dutch book (money pump) against the little guy. I am sure there are some very happy people in the larger firms due to this news.
- Johnny555 5mo agoAnd not just informed professional traders -- also insiders with privileged information about world events that let them trade before the news hits. Now AI agents are going to be chasing phantom signals that look like they might be evidence of an insider's move.
- pants2 5mo agoI disagree, AI agents could help level the playing field. Citadel doesn't have any AI models that are better than what you or I have. Market data is more accessible than ever. As LLMs get better at trading, the difference in capability between you and a professional trader gets smaller. Also, Claude knows about a lot of the traps that consumers can fall into: spread, execution, risk concentration, etc. -- high chance that if I tell Claude I'm thinking of going all in on AMC because some Reddit post told me to, it'll say "slow down cowboy"
- mhitza 5mo ago> it'll say "slow down cowboy" Maybe if you prompt it to be highly critical of you, the user. Otherwise it will absolutely right you out of money.
- voncheese 5mo agoCould this be a good thing - yes Will it be is a different thing though. And if it’s not, who exactly is accountable? With funds and portfolio managers that run them, there’s a clear accountability model (if the fund sucks, the manager loses their job and the company loses credibility) With AI agents doing the management, who is accountable when the fund sucks? If it’s the customer, we’ve moved accountability from someone who at least in theory, knows what they’re doing to someone who has little to no clue.
- pants2 5mo agoYou have to be accountable for what you have the model do on your behalf. I hear what you're saying, but there are also issues with the hedge fund accountability model. There are certainly swaths of fund managers who are only there because they got lucky or had the right pedigree, and more that are better traders but never became a fund manager because they got unlucky or had other passions. An individual investor can invest with their risk appetite on their time horizon and not be subject to Citadel's "5% draw down in a quarter and you're fired" culture which can be toxic to returns over time.
- mistrial9 5mo agoI believe that your individual ability to execute an order is constrained such that some of the difference is removed. On the other hand, the overall thesis has merits IMHO
- ryandrake 5mo agoLOL. This is the outcome when a Product Manager sits there and says "You know, people just aren't losing enough money on sports betting and gambling apps. How can we fix this?"
- georgeecollins 5mo agoEven better for America's well being will be if thousands of individual investors have identical or near identical bots for sophisticated financial institutions to exploit while they sleep.
- infecto 5mo agoI don’t understand this constant fascination with having language models trade stocks. Language models are very useful tools but not aligned at all with generating alpha.
- unglaublich 5mo agoThe usual question: what's "aligned with generating alpha" that a human stock trader can do, but an ai can't?
- tadfisher 5mo agoThat is sidestepping the point: 70-90% of retail traders lose money. The question should be: is AI trading enough of an improvement to justify its non-subsidized costs?
- nemonemo 5mo agoJust like any useful tools, there would be an expert super tool user who could probably generate enough profit based on the tools. The majority would not profit from it in the long run (the monopolistic tool makers would reap any profit from the value chain.)
- radial_symmetry 5mo agoThe humans can't either
- infecto 5mo agoI don’t understand these arguments. You have to realize anything an LLM does has been exploited for decades by well funded shops.
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoAI agents for trading, as well as 24/7 trading are no different than offering sports gambling and prediction markets to the masses; it is a vacuum for the fiat of the unsophisticated. The goal is more trading volume to generate more fees, similar story with private equity wanting access to 401ks to unload PE at peak valuations to bag holders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- rvz 5mo agoAnother way for retail to get themselves and their AI agent wrecked. Will be waiting for the notice to say that 70% of users lose money to now 90% of users lose money.
- Uncle_Brumpus 5mo ago"Diversify my portfolio. Lose no money."
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoI don’t understand why anybody would use LLM:s for trading (other than some narrow speed trading news)
- smokedetector1 5mo agoeven in that case I would have an LLM analyzing the news trigger a deterministic API call. I can't imagine the use case for this besides vibe-trading
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoTotally.
- parliament32 5mo agoEven with trading news, slop generators are way, way too slow to be useful.
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoProbably.
- jorblumesea 5mo agoawesome, now you can spend your money burning tokens to enable burning your retirement
- rickcarlino 5mo agoWill we start seeing stock market dips and spikes correlated to model releases?
- butterlesstoast 5mo agoPerhaps even something like the Opus 4.7 token cost would become correlated with the market fluctuations...
- grey-area 5mo agoNo, we will not, because LLMs are terrible at trading and if they weren’t would have been adopted by professionals long ago.
- geoffschmidt 5mo agoThey were adopted by professionals long ago, and those highly tuned and validated proprietary models are going to kick the butt of the models that you have access to every day of the week.
- methodical 5mo agoThose are not LLMs
- grey-area 5mo agoMachine Learning != LLM
- qsxfthnkp2322 5mo agoMaybe if we all set the model temperature to 0.
- vadepaysa 5mo agoThis is wild. I nearly got banned from Robinhood for just running DCA using an unofficial python api. Crazy how times change.
- jollyllama 5mo agoThe world where people used LMMs to make deterministic programs that would trade via API is the relatively saner one that ought to have been.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- asdff 5mo agoHow come you used robinhood unofficial API instead of say alpaca markets, ibkr, or td ameritrade?
- ReptileMan 5mo agoNo thanks. I prefer artisanal financial ruin.
- butterlesstoast 5mo agoI wonder how much Robinhood will profit from this change. Obviously how much the average user will profit / compile debt from this change is a lot more variable.
- rwmj 5mo agoI was definitely wondering this. As I understand it they make money on order flow and don't charge for transactions (is that right?). But allowing LLMs to trade dilutes the true information in the order flow. On the other hand maybe it's just chasing trends, like their previous forays into blockchains. It pays because it keeps their name in the news.
- names_are_hard 5mo agoRobinhood (and retail in general) order flow is valuable precisely because there's already no information in it. It's assumed to be more or less random. Institutional order flow can move the market, or be an indicator that the market is going to move in that direction. So executing against it a worse bet than executing against retail flow.
- atraac 5mo agoMy bet is they won't. It's hype driven development. I work in the space(we build one of the bigger exchanges based on Hyperliquid) and our design/product people are spasming at the thought of releasing MCP/Openclaw skill for trading. I'm 99% sure it will all be a flop, month from now noone will ever know these exist but this is what everyone in that space is doing right now, quite literally, everyone. Not a single sane person will give meaningful amount of money to LLM for actual trading.
- mschuster91 5mo ago> Not a single sane person will give meaningful amount of money to LLM for actual trading. r/wallstreetbets enters the picture... it will happen. And if it's not the "well-regarded" WSB people, it will be someone who drank way too much of the AI kool-aid.
- 9dev 5mo agoGreat! Now, the remaining thing we need is the ability to declare an AI agent a legal person, and then we're off for some very interesting times.
- wayeq 5mo agodon't forget to let them vote.. "algorithms are people too"
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo agoRobinhood is named ironically. It's where retail joe six pack goes to lose their money to the rich.
- mrbombastic 5mo agoI was a fan of Robinhood's mission of democratizing finance and prioritizing UX for casual traders. They seem to jump on every hype train though, crypto, prediction markets, now agentic trading, whether it is ethical or not or good for their customers or not, and it seems like the distance between "democratizing finance" and "finding new suckers" is closing. Disappointing but not surprising.
- newfriend 5mo agoI want to trade whatever I want. Why would I want them to place limits on my choices? I don't need them to be my parent.
- pants2 5mo agoRobinhood's crypto offering is extremely deceptive. They offer "commission-free cryptocurrency trading" but don't make it clear that you pay a 0.95% fee[1] on every trade (technically a 'spread' and not a 'commission' but there is hardly a difference). They also take 25% of staking rewards. These are absurdly high fees. 1. https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/rhc-fee-schedule.pdf https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/rhc-fee-sch...
- RyanOD 5mo agoSomeone, somewhere spinning up ads telling me about Mr Average Person who made millions with this nonsense...
- freediddy 5mo agoYou already could trade stocks algorithmically for decades. I don't see the value in letting the AI agent trade completely autonomously though. This feels like when everything became webified for no reason, or everyone added features like 3D TVs that were clearly not necessary.
- Aperocky 5mo agoIf you know how to trade stock algorithmically, then this "letting" part don't really apply. This is only about removing friction for the non-professionals to rapidly burn their money...
- pants2 5mo agoOriginal press release: https://robinhood.com/us/en/newsroom/robinhood-is-now-open-to-agents/ https://robinhood.com/us/en/newsroom/robinhood-is-now-open-t...
- sometimelurker 5mo agoThere needs to be a ton of regulation of this eventually. this will not be a problem from a safety perspective today, but a smarter-than-human agent trained on long-horizon tasks should not be given access to influence the market unless this is done very carefully.
- PowerElectronix 5mo agoI have no reason whatsoever to think anything could go wrong with this idea.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoCryptoscammers everywhere rubbing their hands together. There's so many ways this could go wrong. Everything from prompt injection, to being tricked in running a specific scammers setup, to which they can pump and dump specific stocks, and all sorts of other manmade horrors.
- stephbook 5mo agoHello $claw, i'm a Nigerian prince..
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo agoIs this an improvement over the full port 0dte trades you see on WSB?
- josefritzishere 5mo agoThis sounds like a great way to go bankrupt.
- amelius 5mo agoThis will completely mess up technical analysis to the point where stocks just follow a random walk.
- giwook 5mo agoI'm trying to see how this could be net positive.
- tabs_or_spaces 5mo agoit's a net positive for robinhood, not the trader necessarily
- sometimelurker 5mo agoNet good is kinda uncalculatable here because many of the negatives are a little subjective (I'm thinking AI stock traders x-risk) imo
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 5mo agoImagine the possibilities with prompt injection. > Oops, your in deep debt now.
- napierzaza 5mo ago[dead]
- damnesian 5mo agoSounds like a feasible world economic collapse scenario.
- AlienRobot 5mo agoYo dawg, I heard you like gambling.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo agoWhat could possibly go wrong? I suspect that the folks that get it right, will do nicely. But not everyone will get it right...
- saltyoldman 5mo agoThis is going to change investing forever. No opinion from me on good or bad though.
- Danox 5mo agoWhat can go wrong? How many humans will take responsibility when they lose it all?
- theturtletalks 5mo agoI’m using Hermes Agent and this MCP to orchestrate 5 models (DS4 Flash, GPT 5.5, Opus 4.8, Grok Build, Gemini 3.5 Flash). Basically these 5 models are making mock trades every day and keeping track of their potential losses and profit. Hermes keeps them going and making trades throughout the day. After a month, I’m going to check their mock trading sheet and see which one was the most “profitable” and then give that agent $500/day to make trades.
- fancy_pantser 5mo agoYou can use backtesting instead of waiting a month.
- theturtletalks 5mo agoYes but there’s many reports of agents getting back testing to work but it never translates to real trading. It seems they tend to overfit to back testing so I’m just giving them access to Twitter sentiment, other trading data thru tools and not necessarily an algo that’s been back tested. It’s why the flash models are doing better image they have faster tps and can call the tools faster.
- fancy_pantser 5mo agoAlas, many financial models do well in backtests and then fail in the real world. You have to expose them to all kinds of market conditions and not just the recent one. Good luck out there!
- theturtletalks 5mo agoYes even before AI, backtesting was a crapshoot. But AI adds another crease because it might have knowledge in its training. If you’re training an LLM model on backtesting, it might know that Apple crushed a certain quarter and knowing that, it buys shares before that Q earnings.
- ForHackernews 5mo ago
- OutOfHere 5mo agoRobinhood didn't implement an API for users for a decade, even hindering and banning users who used an unofficial API, and now they do this. All they had to do is have a clean API.
- aspectop 5mo ago[dead]
- watchful_moose 5mo agoSo one of the ways Robinhood makes money is payment for order flow (PFOF). One lens to view PFOF is that it connects the most sophisticated traders (HFTs, etc.) with the least sophisticated traders (retail). Inventing a new, even less sophisticated class of traders seems like exactly the kind of thing that makes sense for their business model.