Robinhood stock trading app valued at $1.3B with big raise from DST

a) The only manual order entry method is via the mobile client. There's situations where rapid order entry could definitely be a lot less painful, e.g. limit orders on high-volatility stocks. I've read that some people run multiple instances of the RH client, with one instance running on a desktop system using an android emulator. Not exactly ideal, though supposedly there's an actual web/desktop client in the works. I'd gladly make my own if there was a public API.

b) Robinhood Gold is nice—its simplified presentation is very elegant. However, if they're going to aggressively market relabeled margin accounts to often-clueless retail traders, they need to explain things better. Preferably an entire page with visual explanations and examples of what can happen in different scenarios; stupid-simple stuff that's unambiguous. I can see a lot of people not fully understanding the FAQ on their site, and just thinking "Oh, more buying power!". The current explanations are decent, but it could be a lot better given their target audience.

c) No public API. It's a planned feature that hasn't arrived yet. While Quantopian[0] integration is nice—and definitely better than nothing—it isn't for everyone. I've seen unofficial APIs that send HTTP requests to their private API based off of sniffed traffic from the mobile client (no thanks).

d) No short selling. There's no way to hedge your downside risk or otherwise trade a beta-neutral system on Robinhood currently without using another broker. If the market tanks, most RH users will get wrecked. Especially if it happens fast and they sit there fumbling with order entry.

Overall I love Robinhood, I just wish they'd roll out essential features faster, or at least provide better estimates than "the near future".

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As an aside, if there's any algo traders here that use Robinhood and Quantopian together, I'd love to hear your experiences.

From what I've seen, Quantopian doesn't seem to be suitable for trading at a frequency below minute bars, so I figured it might be possible to use Quantopian as an order conduit for an external system—allowing that external system to in effect place orders on Robinhood as a stop-gap until Robinhood has a public API.

It's a side project and I'm not a Quantopian user, so I haven't yet evaluated the technical feasibility of such a setup.

Obviously I could just move to IB, but I really appreciate Robinhood's engineering ethos. While I'm sure IB's APIs are solid (and they're far more fully-featured), their platform does have a lot of legacy cruft[1] that gives me pause.

[0] https://www.quantopian.com/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009778

Traditional brokerages have a customer acquisition cost of around $400 to get someone to deposit at least $100 in an account.

They've got a million users and continue to grow quicker and quicker. For a small multiple of traditional CAC they are already close to their >$1B valuation just in terms of user acquisition.

It's not easy to get funded brokerage accounts, especially funded accounts by millennials. Their current user base might not be worth much, but the average age of a brokerage account in the US is over 20 years. That means that Robinhood's AUM is only going to grow as their user base gets older and has more money.

Frankly, the current brokerage houses have been dumping hundreds of millions into marketing to try to acquire millennial users without a ton of success. TD Ameritrade alone spent $300 million last year in ads, a lot of that targeted at the millennial market.

Robinhood is a user acquisition strategy for the millennial market and they'll get bought for $2-3 billion within a couple years by one of the existing brokerage houses.