Robinhood now lets your AI agents trade stocks(techcrunch.com) |
Robinhood now lets your AI agents trade stocks(techcrunch.com) |
I didn't like the relatively high fees for QQQ, and I realized that Invesco releases the weights for QQQ for free. I also think Tesla is too overvalued, and I want to avoid the SpaceX IPO. With the Interactive Brokers MCP, I just feed it the CSV of QQQ's weights, tell it to remove and redistribute Tesla, and then I tell it to buy "$1000 of pseudo-QQQ", in the form of raw stocks.
Doing this, I still basically get the same exposure as QQQ, without any fees.
Although maybe a bit spicier, VGT is half the cost of QQQ, so that is what my "NASDAQ" has been. I also blend in VTI to cut the volatility a bit, which is 1/3 the cost of VGT.
LLM's can actually be exceptionally good at research and pattern recognition, i.e. analysis. And while they aren't great at running numbers themselves, they can do exceptional work passing off Python scripts to an interpreter to generate the numerical results they need.
I'm quite sure the Robinhood AI is going to be trash, i.e. just a gimmick.
But, it's not crazy to think that with the right harness, there are big opportunities for identifying profitable strategies. Especially relying on unparalleled and essentially unlimited research capacity based on public information. More analysis than any single firm could ever hire.
And even for Robinhood users, it's entirely plausible that AI-traded stocks will perform much better than the trades a majority of users would make, since most investors are really unsophisticated.
No they aren't, they're good at imitating analysis based on representations of analysis in their training data. Also, Its likely that out dated techniques would over represented in training data.
Do you think Jane Street would have the returns they do if they just imitated all their competitors and everyone was using the same strategies?
I don't think that this contraption should necessarily perform tolerably, but the use of an LLM is not necessarily a wrong move.
Obviously how much the average user will profit / compile debt from this change is a lot more variable.
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.
This feels like when everything became webified for no reason, or everyone added features like 3D TVs that were clearly not necessary.
This is only about removing friction for the non-professionals to rapidly burn their money...
1. https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/rhc-fee-sch...
Will be waiting for the notice to say that 70% of users lose money to now 90% of users lose money.
If you’d like to make dubious trades that’s your prerogative and who am I to stop you.
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"
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.
Maybe if you prompt it to be highly critical of you, the user.
Otherwise it will absolutely right you out of money.
I am sure there are some very happy people in the larger firms due to this news.
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”
I am in the "false confidence" stage of Dunning Kruger Syndrome for finance stuff, so I personally would do swap agreements, but I'm not an average case.
Because, you know, certain actions and even thoughts can lead to eternal damnation in Hell, according to what a society may think. Would you prefer the society to hold you off from that?
I don't let it buy anything without confirming, and I will load the CSV into Google Sheets to make sure that the numbers more or less correspond to what I think they will. It's just easier to directly use the MCP and set up some custom skills for what I want to do.
Dunno, it seems to work fine.
Some tax software nowadays will allow you to simply upload the tax documents with all the transactions and it will tabulate everything for you, so I don't think it will be too hard for me.
I'll admit that there's primarily just kind of a coolness factor to be able to say that I ripped off and copied QQQ without any fees, but I do genuinely like the idea that I can avoid companies that I think are terrible in the process.
I just found it a bit of a pain in the ass to manage a service to do that automatically, vs thirty seconds of chatting and getting results immediately, and having something that can be supplemented by RAGs in the process.
[1] I swear I had a blog post about how I did it somewhere but I seem to have misplaced it.
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/05/nx-s1-5762276/teens-getting-h...
https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism
https://web.archive.org/web/20240226104327/https://youngmone...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240226104327/https://coinmarke...
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.