Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Robinhood hands its retail traders AI agents that run strategies in separate accounts
Robinhood says more than 150,000 customers have opened AI agent trading accounts that generate roughly 30 million automated actions a day. The agents' guardrail is a manual-approval default that customers can adjust. Robinhood is setting that default as the company pushes toward trading that never stops.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- The agents first reached customers in May through outside software, and customers can now build and deploy them natively on the phone using models from developers including OpenAI.
- An upcoming feature called Loops will let agents carry out standing instructions continuously, around the clock.
- Pending regulatory approval, Robinhood plans to extend its 24 Hour market, launched in 2023, through weekends for a curated list of stocks and ETFs.
- Eligible US traders will soon get crypto perpetual futures through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp, with leverage up to 10x on bitcoin and ethereum.
- A companion product, Agent Apps, lets customers feed their agents data from providers including Nasdaq, Spotgamma and Unusual Whales.
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Why it matters
- exposure Because the safety parameters are adjustable, a customer who loosens them takes on the risk the default approval step was built to hold back.
- constraint Weekend stock trading needs a regulator's sign-off, so the date on which the app's stock market stops closing is outside Robinhood's control.
- decision Rival retail brokers now have to choose between building native agents to compete for active traders and waiting to see how Robinhood's containment holds up at this volume.
Divide one company figure by the other and each agentic account averages at most about 200 automated actions a day [1]. Robinhood describes a design in which agents trade only inside dedicated accounts, with adjustable safety settings and manual approval of trades as the default [4]. Approving 200 trades a day by hand is not a realistic workload for a retail customer [1]. The likelier explanations are that most actions are not orders, that many customers have loosened the default, or that much of the count comes from the outside software customers could connect from May [3]. Robinhood did not say what counts as an action or how many accounts still require approval.
The board-deck version of the launch is Vlad Tenev's line at the HOOD Summit [11]. "We're making Robinhood the best place in the world for active traders by delivering tools once reserved for hedge funds, big banks, and quant firms," the chief executive said [12]. As the company describes it, the supervision around those tools is a separate account and a set of safety parameters the retail customer can change [4].
The agents are live, while Loops is still upcoming and weekend stocks wait on regulatory approval [5][7]. So the containment design is being settled before anyone sees how it behaves once the hours expand. A standing instruction is set once and then runs [5]. When Loops arrives, I'd expect human review to move from each order to the instruction behind it, with the orders going out at whatever hour the instruction fires.
"Breaking news doesn't wait for an opening bell. With the upcoming launch of weekend trading, we're making sure our customers won't have to either," said Steve Quirk, Robinhood's chief brokerage officer [13]. The weekend market will run on Bruce ATS, an alternative trading system [8]. The company presents the agents and the crypto perpetual futures as separate launches [1][9]. If agents can reach the perpetuals, a standing instruction could be trading at 10x on a Sunday [9].
Tenev made his case to the summit about trading itself. "Ownership doesn't work without markets, and markets don't work without traders," he said [11]. The rest of the slate points the same way, down to binary contracts on company earnings metrics through Cboe, timed for the third-quarter season [10]. Each product gives customers either more to trade or more time to trade it. I think the separate-account structure is the right way to put automation in a retail app. I would change that view if most of the roughly 30 million daily actions turn out to be orders nobody approved [2].
What to watch
- The regulatory decision on weekend equities trading through Bruce ATS, and whether it attaches conditions to automated orders.
- The settings Robinhood ships with Loops, in particular whether each order generated by a standing instruction still needs the customer's approval.