Robinhood adds option trading to its free no commission platform
RobinHood has been around for a few years now and has millions of users for its free stock trading service saving its clients as much as $13.00 per trade.
Yesterday a blog was posted by them announcing they will begin a no commission options trading service as well saving traders even more. Options typically cost about $5.00 dollars for the trade and as much as 0.75 per contract involved in the trade which can be dozens to hundreds of contracts making options fairly expensive in terms of fees.
In addition to buying options with cash in your account, RobinHood is enabling margin for selling option contracts as well outright or as part of complex option strategies.
It is unclear to me if they have the platform enabled to sell stocks short on margin as well or not though.
This will definitely increase the interest in using RobinHood as a broker as its waiting list for options approval is already over 150,000 people. Also possibly shake up fee structures in other brokerage firms.
I'm guessing this is only for the US market- I still trade the UK- along with probably about eleven others!
@terrapintrader Can't say for sure it was put on Robinhood's official blog the other day, I am pretty sure Robinhood is based the US only I don't know if they are even registered/licensed to be a broker in the UK. They are a really small up and coming brokerage nowhere near the level of the big investment banks that function internationally and have been around for decades.
we live in financial serfdom in the UK but I had followed Robin Hood for some time -good work-maybe there's a symbiosis with my site