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Comment by protomok | Hacker News Reader

Nice, I would probably use it the same way.

Would you know if Robinhood supports pre-authorized purchase plans? For example the ability to buy x shares of VOO on the first day of each month automatically? I didn't see anything on the FAQ but maybe I missed it. Pre-authorized purchase plans + no commissions could be interesting.

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I'm not aware of any such feature. You can set up a monthly deposit into your Robinhood account, and you'll get a notification on your phone each time it goes through, but you have to manually submit purchase requests each time as far as I know. At least, that's what I'm doing! I'd love to hear of an alternative. Not that hard to hit the sequence of buttons each month, though.

You can use Quantopian to write a Python script that trades on a live Robinhood portfolio. Their target audience is algorithmic traders, but I've written a simple script that just rebalances my portfolio among a small set of index funds each day. Pretty simple to do and completely free.

I'll try to do a blog post when I get the chance.

They have an auto-deposit feature[0], but it doesn't purchase the stocks for you.

There is an unofficial api[1] you could use to cron-buy, though it's unofficial-ness means I don't officially endorse :)

[0] https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en-us/articles/206445496-Tr... [1] https://github.com/sanko/Robinhood

Robinhood is severely lacking in features and it is mobile app only, no website. If you want that kind of thing with index funds go with another brokerage (Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, all have commission free index funds.) The other really crappy thing about Robinhood is that it doesn't integrate with other platforms so if you want to track your wealth with Mint or Personal Capital you can't.

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