From looking at their website, it appears that commission free API trading is a possibility. That would certainly enhance algo performance and relax frequent trading constraints. It seems like a good synergy with Quantopian.

Great idea. Would love some sort of Robin Hood integration.

Second this. Would be a wonderful news for low-frequency algos.

https://www.quantopian.com/posts/how-to-implement-algo-to-other-trading-website

Karen Rubin  
posted Mar 31, 2015

We'd love to integrate with Robinhood too! Unfortunately they haven't opened up their APIs yet...but we are definitely talking to them. Feel free to let them know you'd like the integration as well.  

Vladimir,

Thank you for pointing out the previous discussion thread.

I wonder if Quantopian is participating in the API beta?

This statement is dated July 6, 2015 on their FAQs:

"We are offering Robinhood API access to a select group of customers in 2015. If you’re interested in working with our API, please email us at [email protected]."

You aren't getting a free lunch with Robinhood. What you are gaining in commissions you are almost certainly losing in execution performance. I would take IB over Robinhood any day of the week unless they opened up about how specifically they trade your orders.

Even if execution performance is not as good , the zero commissioning is a real edge in the market . I really hope Q guys are looking to connect to it or at least enable an exist point for us to code the way to this broker.

out of curiosity, any news regarding Robinhood possible integration?

Robinhood is from a group of HFT so you are sure to be giving them a few ticks every execution. Just like most forex brokers out there.

@ Lucas, could you explain it a little more for a newbie like me that didn't get what you mean? What is exactly the disadvantage of Robinhood? Isn't that true that you don't pay commission for trading on Robinhood?

First I would like to say I have not checked their business model and their system but normally brokers / forex website that offer no comission trade have a built-in commission.

Say the share or the currency pair has a SELL at 100 and a BUY at 105 you will see a SELL at 98 and a BUY at 107 so with their spread they take 2 ticks each transaction. Besides other strategies used to gain advantage from the user's data.

Most Brokers sell the user Data and others try to trade against it ( ops delete delete delete) use it to their advantage. For example IB has a trading unity / Market making that is regulated that can trade using your data. TD Ameritrade sell the user data to citadel. etc..

The user data is worth a lot of money. So most important is the tick spread, and never use market or stop order. Their bots will love those lol.
IB has some order types that you are hidden, but I am not sure Quantopian support them. I went through most of IB order type and when you do, you realize most order types are for the robots, or quants. Quantopian is just scratching the surface with limit / market / stop orders.

@Lucas
Even if they feed your trade to their HFT algo and scalp it, they still have to honor the NBBO, right? I would only be concerned if they delay your execution for their benefit. So, on a liquid security with a spread of 0.01, they could get a fraction of a penny. Perhaps in a liquidity crunch, they could make out well if you or your algo trades during that time.

So, based upon all your examples, I can see their advertisement now... Robinhood, we're no worse than anyone else!

So, I see no commission trades with NBBO execution. I think they are worth further investigation and testing by Quantopian.

I believe they make money on margin trading...not regular orders. Thats what they say, so unless they're hiding something (which i doubt) they only make money on margin trades.

Thanks Lucas for the detailed explanation. So if Robinhood has this so called "built-in commission" we have to see if it's better than other broker commission. But it's not easy to evaluate as their "built-in commission" are secret.

By the way, to whom is curious, this is what Robinhood says regarding how they make money:

Robinhood makes money in many of the same ways as traditional online brokerages. These include:

• Collecting interest from customers who choose to upgrade to a margin account. We are testing margin in beta and will offer margin accounts later this year.

• Accruing interest from customers’ uninvested cash balances. It is important to note that our customers are not charged.

I just published a Python package that will allow you to make commission-free algorithmic trades using Robinhood's API: https://github.com/benkroop/robinhood

You don't need beta API access to use this. This package uses the same API endpoints the phone app uses and authenticates using your normal username and password.

Edit2: Looks like this probably won't work with zipline, but there are other open source packages out there that can run real-time stock trading algorithms.

Although this doesn't work inside of Quantopian, you may be able to live trade your Quantopian algorithms on Robinhood using Quantopian's Zipline library, which you can use to to run your algorithms on your local machine: https://github.com/quantopian/zipline

If it works, I'm planning to write up a tutorial in the next day or two explaining how to run your algorithm with commission-free trades on Robinhood using Quantopian/Zipline

Let me know if you have any feedback or feature requests!

Edit: Testing compatibility now

Reverse engineering of phone app API? Cool.

wow really risky to use such crude API for real-money trading. You need tons of watchdogs, alert systems. Might be worth to get it integrated in Zipline though do one can check the spreads against IB and test the theory above. That they are not eating ticks.

We're happy to announce a formal integration between Quantopian and Robinhood:

See this fresh forum thread: https://www.quantopian.com/posts/zero-commission-algorithmic-trading-robinhood-and-quantopian
Other information: https://www.quantopian.com/robinhood