This article was started before all the stories around Robinhood and $GME GameStop 🚀. I’ll avoid talking about that in this article. I will not explain what options trading is in this article, maybe in another one.I will not talk about the harmful effect of having a simple app to deal with money.
I’m a Software Engineer currently working at Uber 🚘 in San Francisco 🇺🇸. I’ll describe my experience with Robinhood, and why/how I had to build my own app to add the features I thought were missing from Robinhood.
Here is the work-in-progress app, as of Jan 31st, 2021:
Robinhood, for my European friends, is a ~ trading platform. 💰I think it’s a great platform because the UI is simple, pretty, which makes it easy for most of us to start investing/trading. It became famous because 1️⃣ the UI is simple and 2️⃣ it’s commission-free. Now, a lot of other free trading platforms exist.
This article will describe how I use Robinhood, I will list what I think are the missing features and how SoTrade brings solutions.I added some technical details describing how I reverse-engineered Robinhood to use their private APIs. 🤘
Whenever I have some cash from a good trade, I buy stocks. Looking at my portfolio, the main company I believe in is Apple 🍎…I do not day trade with Stocks, I rarely look at it. I invest and forget about it.
Wiki definition: An option is a contract that allows a buyer the right to buy or sell an underlying asset or financial instrument at a specified strike price prior to or on a specified date.
I usually day trade with options, or keep up to a week or two.I should learn more about leaps. ( = 1 to 3 years out in the future)
I discovered this strategy recently, a great risk-managed strategy. It’s cheaper than options but also your gains are capped. Capped means that you will have a max profit.For instance, if you bet that Apple wil be more than $150, it doesn’t matter if Apple is $150 or $200 at expiration, you will get the same max profit.As opposed to options where your gains are unlimited.
I don’t really do that, I have a tiny bit of crypto just to see where it goes.I do have some Dogecoin just because there is a doggy on the coin! 🐶
Note:You can see that Index funds are missing from this list, it’s because I use Fidelity for that. I don’t want to do day trading with it, I want to keep it separate, invest monthly, automatically, not look at it and forget about it.
SoTrade is a cross-platform app (iOS, Android) built with React Native.I created like a widget for every feature that I think Robinhood was missing.Users will be able to go to the settings and only add the one they are interested in.