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Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

Nice, now hopefully they can deliver on a public API, short selling, and a desktop app.

I would be pretty surprised if they introduced short selling. There's no question that a good chunk of Robinhood's user base are novice investors. Those that do not understand short selling may land themselves into a lot of a hot water. There may be measures RH could take to prevent novice users from dangerous short selling plays. I'd be curious to see how they introduce it.

I actually emailed support about this a while back and was told it's on the roadmap.

They could introduce put options, at least.

Just so they offer some form of betting against the market. I don't care how.

Creating beta-neutral systems with Robinhood would then be possible.

(Not trading advice, yada yada)

Well,

The way I approach betting against the market is inverse leveraged ETFs. If you want to bet against S&P 500, ProShares has a 2X inverse offering, and you can probably balance it with 3x leveraged gold JNUG / JDST as they track the market.

Nice, I never knew inverse ETFs existed. Thanks for this!

Not sure exactly what you're looking for in a Robinhood API, but I work for a company that provides a brokerage API (the sort of API that would power a Robinhood-type product). Might be relevant: https://www.thirdparty.com

We've got quite a few things on the roadmap that exceed Robinhood's offering.

In your theoretical opinion, what would set your company apart from any other offering the same?

The market you're targeting is at least an order of magnitude out of my price range, but I appreciate the info. Best of luck.

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