Nasdaq-listed Robinhood HOOD$112,51·Mercato chiuso is launching an AI tool that can trade on customers’ behalf, even when they’re away. But it’s not without risks, according to Robinhood’s own disclosures.
The online trading platform, which has more than 27 million funded accounts, announced Robinhood Agents on Tuesday at its HOOD Summit in Houston. The tool is built into the Robinhood app. It can research markets, build strategies and place trades for a customer at any hour.
AI agents are different from chatbots. A chatbot answers questions. An agent takes action, in this case buying and selling on a customer's behalf within limits the customer sets.
In other words, Robinhood is bringing automated trading, long the domain of hedge funds and quant firms, to everyday investors.
It's a big step up from Robinhood's May launch, which let tech-savvy users connect their own AI agents to their accounts. More than 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts since, and these agents now tap Robinhood's tools almost 30 million times a day, according to the company.
Now anyone can do it by selecting and approving an AI agent.
“Agentic accounts come with trade approvals settings which you can configure to allow automated trade execution. With approvals on, your agent cannot place an order until you approve it. You can turn trade approvals off, and if you do, your agent can place orders without asking you to confirm each one,” the announcement said.
Next up is a feature called Loops. It turns a strategy into a standing instruction that the agent carries out on repeat, day and night. For example, an agent could check the market every morning and trade when certain conditions are met, or run a strategy overnight while the customer sleeps. Robinhood says Loops is coming soon.
The announcement fits a broader industry trend of AI agents that move money, pay bills and place trades on a user's behalf. Meta's Muse assistant can already see users' bank balances and investments, and x402, a payments protocol developed by Coinbase, lets agents pay for services in stablecoins.
Robinhood’s AI agents are not without risks and the announcement makes it clear who carries it.
Customers “assume all risk for trades secuted by AI agents and for any use of your data by third-party LLM providers,” the company said in its announcement. It added that Robinhood “does not control, supervise, monitor, recommend, or audit agents.”
The warning is particularly sharper for the Loop feature, that lets agents run strategies on repeat. Once switched on, Loops “may place, modify, or cancel trades in your account automatically, without prompting you for approval on each transaction – including while you’re asleep, away from your device, or otherwise not monitoring the market.”
Source
This article is syndicated for educational reading. For the latest updates, visit the original publisher.
Read on coindesk.com