Robinhood Pre-Market and After-Hours Trading
As everyone knows, Robinhood offers trading in stocks and ETFs during the regular market session. Less well known are Robinhood’s trading hours for pre-market and after-hour sessions. If you want to amp up your trading, you have to understand these trading periods, which are definitely available at Robinhood. For more details on Robinhood’s extended hours, keep reading.
Robinhood’s Trading Hours
Robinhood offers trading of stocks, options, and ETFs during the regular day session. This
trading period begins at 9:30 am, New York time, and ends at 4:00 pm.
Robinhood’s trading hours for cryptocurrencies are different. Digital coins trade around the clock, 24/7.
There are a few minutes each day when crypto trading is unavailable for scheduled maintenance, bug fixes, and the like. During these windows, crypto trades can still be placed, but they won’t execute until trading resumes.
Robinhood Pre-Market Trading
For stocks and exchange-traded funds, Robinhood offers a pre-market session so that investors can buy and sell the securities before the market opens. Robinhood’s premarket trading session is 2 hours and 30 minutes long. It runs from 7:00 am until the opening bell, which, as we have seen, is at 9:30 am.
2.5 hours is not a long trading session, although it’s better than nothing. Some brokerage firms, like Vanguard, don’t have a pre-market period at all. In contrast, a $0-commission broker Webull’s pre-market
session opens at 4:00 am, EST and ends at 9:30 am, EST. These are the longest pre-market trading hours in the industry.
Learn more in 4:00 AM Trading Broker
or read WeBull Review.
Robinhood After-Hours Trading
ETFs and equities also have an after-hours period on the Robinhood platform. Robinhood’s
after-hours trading period runs from the closing bell (4:00 pm) until 8:00 pm.
Webull not only offers the longest
extended-hours period in the industry (4:00 am until 8:00 pm, EST), but also paper trading, IRA
accounts, and an excellent trading platform, all of which are not available on Robinhood.
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How to Buy Stocks Pre-Market at Robinhood
If you want to know how to buy stocks pre-market at Robinhood, here is the answer:
Obviously, you need to open a Robinhood brokerage account if you haven’t done so already. Just
click on the Claim your free stock now and fill out the short application.
Once you have your Robinhood account open, there’s no need to sign any additional forms to get pre-market or after-hours trading privileges. Robinhood’s extended hours are automatically added to every account.
The first thing you need to do is choose a stock or ETF to buy. And we do mean buy here. Short selling is not possible at Robinhood.
To find a security to buy in the pre-market session, you can browse through an extended-hours trading stock screener. Robinhood does not have one, and in fact, the broker has no screener at all. There are some free extended-hours screeners online. We recommend using one of them.
If this method doesn’t show you how to buy stocks pre-market at Robinhood, we have a second suggestion for you: use an economic calendar. Once again, Robinhood doesn’t have one of these on its trading platform, so you’ll need to find one elsewhere.
Economic calendars display upcoming corporate releases of financial data. When these numbers come out, stock prices can shoot way up or way down if the numbers are significantly off from what analysts were expecting.
You’ll want to know what specific company is releasing data in the morning so you’ll be ready to place a trade if its numbers are off. Remember that you can only enter a trade for a security at Robinhood on the buy side. If a stock begins tanking, you can’t sell it on the entry side.
Submitting an order during Robinhood’s premarket trading session follows the same steps as any other trade with just a few exceptions.
A security’s profile has an order ticket on either the website or mobile app. It will automatically default to buy if you don’t yet have a position. If you do, the ticket will only allow you to sell the shares you have (no shorting!).
Although multiple order types are available, most cannot be used during Robinhood’s extended hours. Only limit and market orders are permissible during the pre-market and after-hours sessions, and Robinhood converts market orders to limits orders, so it may be best simply to use limit orders with your own limit prices.
Now that you know how to buy stocks pre-market on Robinhood web platform, it’s time to look at trading after the regular session.
Buying Stocks After Hours on Robinhood
When the closing bell rings on Wall Street, buying stocks after hours at Robinhood continues. Once again, there is no economic calendar or extended-hours screener, so research will have to be conducted off of the Robinhood site.
Once you have a stock or two in mind for the evening session, it’s time to keep an eye on the
price movements. Because you can only buy on the entry side during Robinhood’s after-hours trading period, you’ll want to be looking for an earnings announcement that is much larger than expected. This will send the stock shooting up, which is great for all the bulls out there.
If you see this situation, you want to hurry up and buy the stock. To do this, select Trade (on the mobile app) or Review Order (on the website). On either platform, you can specify regular market hours or market hours plus extended hours. This second option of course is required for an order to execute either during the pre-market session or after-hours period.
It is not possible to specify an order at Robinhood only for the after-hours period (excluding the day session and pre-market period, for example).
Robinhood’s trading platforms also don’t specify whether a security participates in extended-hours trading (not all do). You’ll need to find this information elsewhere online. A lot of major stocks and ETFs do participate.
If you select extended hours on Robinhood’s order ticket, the regular day session is automatically included. If an order doesn’t fill during extended hours for any reason, it will be queued for the day session.
Now that you’re an expert at buying stocks after hours at Robinhood, it’s time to look in greater detail at the broker’s trading tools.
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Software
If you decide to give pre-market and after-hours trading a shot at Robinhood, you’ll get basic but effective trading tools. There is no desktop platform. As for the Robinhood site, it’s kind of a hybrid website-browser platform.
At the top of the screen is a search bar. If you know the company or fund name or ticker symbol, this is a good place to begin. Further down the screen is a group of Trending Lists. These are collections of securities (stocks and ETFs) that Robinhood uses instead of actual screening tools.
On the right-hand side is a vertical menu of multiple watchlists. It’s easy to add and delete entries or entire lists. Click on an entry to pull up that asset’s profile.
The same watchlist and order ticket on the website appear on Robinhood’s mobile app. The main difference is that charting is better on the web. The mobile app does not have a horizontal mode or any technical studies.
On both the website and mobile app, there are two color themes: light and dark. It’s possible to have these alternate by selecting Market Hours for the app’s appearance (look under Settings under the Main Menu). In this context, market hours refers to Robinhood’s entire trading session, including regular market hours, pre-market trading, and the after-hours session. These times will be light, and outside of the hours the platform will switch to dark.
Once you learn these rather simple trading platforms, buying stocks after hours on Robinhood is pretty straightforward.
Security Research
We’ve already mentioned that there is no screener on the Robinhood site. But this doesn’t mean there are no research tools. The Trending Lists have groups like Cannabis, Index ETFs, and 100 Most Popular. One list especially important to extended-hours traders is Upcoming Earnings. Only stocks that report earnings in the next 7 days get on this list.
Stock profiles have a moderate amount of details on them. News articles with thumbnails are listed from a variety of sources. Analyst ratings are shown from many sources (Mastercard has 36 trade recommendations). Earnings from the past 7 quarters are displayed in graphical format.
Fees and Commissions
The same pricing schedule applies to all of Robinhood’s trading hours. ETF and stock trades have zero commissions and zero hold times (day trading is possible here). Accounts have no minimums and no fees.
Placing a trade during Robinhood’s pre-market trading or after-hours trading does not tack on any surcharges.
Robinhood is one of the few brokerage firms today that charges neither commissions nor markups/markdowns on cryptocurrency trades.
Robinhood Gold Trading Hours
Gold is Robinhood’s membership plan that includes some additional benefits that regular Robinhood customers don’t get. Robinhood Gold’s trading hours are the same, however.
Benefits of the subscription include:
- Morningstar research
- Bigger instant deposits
- Margin trading
- Level II data
These are some nice perks, but the service still disappoints us because Robinhood Gold’s trading
hours aren’t longer.
Pitfalls of Trading During Extended Hours
One of the biggest disadvantages of extended-hours trading is that option contracts aren’t eligible. So you won’t be able to use Robinhood’s options service during early-bird or late-night sessions.
Volume tends to be lower during extended hours, and this means it could be hard to find a counterparty to your trade. A limit order could only be partially filled or not filled at all.
Moreover, bid-ask spreads are usually wider, which makes trading more expensive. And increased volatility during these times makes trading more stressful and difficult.
Advantages of Trading During Extended Hours
Extended-hours trading has some notable advantages. Companies report their earnings every quarter, and these releases are submitted during extended hours. If the numbers are off, stock prices will move, sometimes significantly. If you can’t trade during extended hours, then you can’t participate in these price movements.
Also, world events can cause stock prices to move. These can happen while the U.S. stock market is closed, so once again you need access to extended-hours trading to capture such price movements.
Example of an Extended-Hours Trade at Robinhood
Here’s an example of us buying a stock during Robinhood’s pre-market trading:
It’s 9:05 am. The opening bell rings in 25 minutes. We want to buy 10 shares of HOOD. This is Robinhood’s stock trading on the Nasdaq. We type in the ticker symbol in the search bar at the top of the website and click on Robinhood Markets in the drop-down menu.
It’s also possible to do the same on the mobile app. Tap on the magnifying glass and search for HOOD. Either platform pulls up the profile for the stock.
Robinhood’s software displays the current pre-market price in large font. This is a little different than what other sites will do. For example, Google’s site displays yesterday’s closing price in large font. So be aware of what number you’re looking at.
Underneath the current pre-market price, there will be two other numbers before the pre-market session begins: one shows what the stock did yesterday, in both dollar and percent terms (from the previous day’s close). The second shows how the stock is doing during extended hours (after-hours plus pre-market).
Once 9:00 arrives and pre-market trading begins, yesterday’s closing price will disappear.
To start filling out the order ticket, we tap on Trade on the mobile app and then select Buy. We choose a limit order and then set the limit price. Next, we have to set the trading hours. There are two options: market hours or extended hours plus market hours. We choose the latter of course.
Following the trading hours, we select a time-in-force option, which can be either at the end of the late-night period or a future date. Finally, we enter the number of shares and submit the trade.
We got a fill price of $12.54. Not bad.
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Updated on 1/28/2022.
Chad Morris is a financial writer with more than 20 years experience
as both an English teacher and an avid trader. When he isn’t writing
expert content for Brokerage-Review.com, Chad can usually be found
managing his portfolio or building a new home computer.
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