Robinhood

How to get started with trading on Robinhood

In this tutorial, we will show you how to create a simple automated trading bot that will make trades on Robinhood. This tutorial is intended for beginners who have little to no experience with writing code and those who are new to the Block Builder. At the end of this tuturial, you will have everything you need to start running your very own algorithmic trading bot.

First, you'll need to import the robinhood api into your trading bot. This will allow your bot to "talk" to Robinhood and make trades. Select Robinhood from the side tray and drag the "Import Robinhood" block into the workspace. Notice that if you hover over each block, you will see a small tooltip that will describe the block and its purpose.

Next you'll need to set up your login details. Your bot needs to be able to login to your account in order to make trades. Your password and the code itself is encrypted. Drag the "Login" block into the workspace and input your username and password. Remember that you do not need to enclose your username and password in quotes.

Now that your bot can access your account, we'll need to tell your bot to collect the information it needs to make trades. Select Time from the side tray and drag "Import Time" into the workpace. This will make your bot aware of the passage of time and allow you to schedule actions as needed.

Next we need to create a function. Most of your trading logic will be described in functions so it is a good idea to get familair with them. Select functions from the side tray. Drag the first function block and the function block with the same name into the workspace. Notice that the function block does not attach to the main body of our other blocks. Functions can stand on there own and can be invoked elsewhere in the code. This can be very helpful when designing more complex trading bots that need to perform many different operations throughout its lifecycle. Once the function is in place, change the name to something other than "do something". Function names should describe their purpose. For this tutorial, we'll just name it "trade". Note that you can also add your own description by clicking the ? icon.

Now that your function has been placed, we need to fill it with our trading logic. Select time from the side tray and drag "Sleep" into the function. Then select math and drag in the "Number" block, placing it in the "Sleep" block. We will set it so sleep for sixty seconds. This block will tell our bot to wait for the specified number of seconds before moving on the the next step in its logic. Many exchanges have some kind of rate limiting in place that prevents people from overwhelming their servers with too many requests. If we don't tell our bot to wait, there is a good chance it will be blocked by their servers.

Next we need to declare some variables that will store the information we need our bot to work with. Select variables from the side tray and the select create variable. We'll call this one "price". Repeat this step again to create another variable called "qty". These variables will store the price of a given stock and the quantity of shares we will be dealing with.

Select variables again and drag the "Set" block into the workspace below the "Sleep" block. From the dropdown, select price. Now go to Robinhood and drag the "Get latest price for" to the end of the "Set" block. Finally, select text and drag the empty quotes block to the end of the "Get latest price block". Enter "AAPL" into the empty field. This set of blocks will get the current price of Apple stock and store that price in memory for use later.

Now we need to input our trading rules for the bot to follow. Select logic and drag the "If do else" block into the function. Head to logic again and drag the "And" block next to the first open space on the "If do else" block in the workspace. Finally, head to logic one more time and drag two "=" blocks to the workspace. Place both blocks inside of the "And" block. This creates a conditional statement where our bot will only perform next step in our trade logic if two conditions are satisifed at the same time. Otherwise, it will skip that step and perform the next peration. Select the first "=" block and from the drop down, change it to less than or equal to. Select variables and drag the "price" variable into the first "=" block. Now select math and drag a "Number" block into the other empty slot on the "=" block. Set that number to 200. Do the same for the other "=" block except this time select the "qty" varaible and set the number to 0. We are now telling our bot that it sould only perform the next step if the price of our stock is less than $200 and we are currently not holding any shares already.

Now that we've set our conditons, it' time to make a trade. Select Robinhood and drag the "Place buy order at limit price for" block into the "do" section of our "if do else block". Right click the text block "AAPL" and select duplicate. Drag that new block into the fist empty field of our new block. Do that again for any number block, this time draging int the quantity field and set it to 10. Finally duplicate the price variable block and drag it to the price field. This will tell our bot to place a limit buy order for 10 shares for a maximum price of $200 per share. We will assume that when this logic executes, our trade will succeed. We now need to tell our bot that it has 10 new shares of our stock and that it must now loop through our logic again. Select variables and drag the "set to block" into the workspace. From the dropdown, select qty. Duplicate any "number" block and drag it to the end. Set the number to 10. Finally select functions and drag a "Trade" block (or the block that has the same name as your function), and add it to the end.

Now we need to tell our bot what to do if it has those shares and the price is high enough for us to make a profit. Drag a few more blocks into place until your workspace looks something like this.

Your bot will now sell all your shares at market price when the price for your stock exceeds $220. The bot will continue to run through this logic every day until you tell it to stop. To run this trading bot, select "Run" form the side menu and then select "Start Bot Now!" from the pop up menu. To shutdown your bot select "Stop" from the side menu. All running bots will appear in the load menu. You can shutdown your bot from the load menu as well.

Congradulations, you now have everything you need to build your own trading bot. Keep in mind that, for the purposes of this tutorial, we kept our trading logic simple. You don't need a complicated strategy to make money, many successful bots are often simple. However, it pays to do your own research and develope a strategy that satisfies your investment goals and risk tolerances.

If you have any questions or if you would like to see other topics covered, email us at info@traderblocks.com

Download Example Code

Logging

In order to monitor your bots activity, you can instruct it to create logs as it runs. Logs can help you to better understand how your bot performs overtime or help you fix any bugs you might find. All bots are preconfigured to capture and store logs so can focus on more creating a winning strategy and less on writing code.

Getting started with logs is easy. In the side tray there is a Logs tab that contains two blocks that will allow your bot to produce logs. The first block accepts only text and the second an object. Objects can contain almost anything and will likely be your primary solution for capturing valuable information as your bot runs.

For our purposes, we've set up this simple bot to demonstrate some common scenarios were logging can be useful. This bot will periodically check the price of a given stock and log the price. For more information abput how we are capturing this information, refer to our Alpaca tutorial.

Once we start the bot, in few minutes we will be able to start viewing the log output by hitting the View Logs button. If the log blocks are not used or if there was an error in the code, you should see a warning message instead of the log output.

If we hit the View Code button, we can see that under the hood, the log blocks create a "logger.info()" line. This line can be used in the Advanced Editor as well to achieve the same result.

If you have any questions or if you would like to see other topics covered, email us at info@traderblocks.com