A Robinhood alternative for the trades Robinhood does not offer

Most of the roundups that rank for this query answer it with another brokerage, which is fine if the problem is a fee or an interface. The people this page is for have a different problem: something they want to trade is not on Robinhood at all, or the way they want to trade it is not possible in a brokerage account. In Robinhood's own terms the list looks like this.

• You want to short a stock, and a cash brokerage account has no short button
• You want leverage on gold, oil, an index or a currency pair, not only on crypto
• You want exposure to Anthropic or OpenAI, and a brokerage lists what an exchange lists
• You want to hold the position in a wallet you control rather than in a firm's custody
• Robinhood does not serve your country

Robinhood is a US-regulated broker-dealer. You open an account, verify your identity, deposit cash and buy shares, ETFs, options and crypto that the firm holds in custody for you, with the investor protections that come with that structure. Stocks trade in exchange sessions, with extended hours on many names; crypto trades around the clock. It is designed around owning assets in a brokerage account, and it does that job well. Nothing on this page argues otherwise.

Hypertradeworx is not a brokerage. It is a non-custodial trading terminal, on Android and in the browser, that routes perpetual futures orders to five on-chain venues from one wallet you control. The instrument is different from what you hold at Robinhood: a perp is a leveraged contract on a price, settled in USDC, with no expiry and no ownership of the thing it tracks. That is exactly what makes it possible to be long Anthropic, short Nvidia and long gold from the same balance, and it is also why the section on what you give up is the longest one on this page.

The most common reason a Robinhood user goes looking is a view that a stock will fall and no way to act on it. On a perpetual future, short is the other side of the same ticket: the same margin, no borrow to locate, no margin-loan approval and no recall. A perp on Nvidia or Tesla can be shorted the same way it can be bought, from the same USDC balance that holds a long on gold. The trade-off is that perps are leveraged instruments with liquidation risk, so position sizing matters in a way it never did in a cash account.

• Long and short are symmetric on every market, stocks included
• No margin account application, the leverage is on the ticket
• Stock and index perps keep US exchange hours; pre-IPO and crypto perps do not close

A brokerage lists what an exchange lists, in that exchange's session. A perps terminal lists what a venue can price through an oracle, which reaches private companies and lets stocks, metals and FX be traded with the same ticket and the same margin as crypto. As of September 2026 the catalog runs past 700 markets across seven asset classes.

• Pre-IPO: Anthropic and OpenAI as perpetual futures on implied valuation, quoted in points of $1B, around the clock
• Stocks: Tesla, Nvidia, Apple and 30-plus US names as perps, long or short, no share custody
• Gold, silver, platinum, copper and oil as commodity perps; the majors as FX perps; the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 as index perps
• Crypto perps on Hyperliquid, Lighter, AsterDex, Ostium and GMX, one ticket for all five

At Robinhood your assets sit in an account the firm holds for you, which is what makes the protections it advertises possible. In Hypertradeworx there is no account in that sense. You sign in with an email or a wallet, an embedded self-custodial wallet is created with keys on your device, and every order is signed by you. Hypertradeworx never holds funds and cannot move them. The app itself does not gate trading behind identity verification, because it is an interface rather than a custodian; third-party card and bank funding providers apply their own requirements, and what is available to you depends on your jurisdiction and is yours to check.

Hypertradeworx charges 0.05% of notional on perp orders, taken as an integrator fee on the venues that support one and shown on the confirmation before you sign. The venue charges its own trading fee on top and keeps it; Lighter's order books are the exception, at zero. There is no account fee, no inactivity fee, no deposit fee and no withdrawal fee on our side, and no spread of ours inside the price. What there is instead of a broker's costs: network gas on deposits and withdrawals, and funding between longs and shorts on any perp you hold through a settlement. The full schedule is on the fees page.

Be clear about this before moving anything. A perp is not a share. You get no dividends, no votes and no claim on the company, and a pre-IPO perp confers nothing if the company lists. There is no deposit insurance and no investor-protection scheme standing behind a self-custodial wallet; if you lose the device and the recovery, nobody can restore the account. Equity perps are far thinner than the underlying stock market, so spreads are wider and size moves the price. Leverage adds liquidation, a risk a cash brokerage account does not have. And a brokerage's tax-advantaged accounts, interest on idle cash and phone support do not exist here.

• No ownership, dividends or voting rights
• No deposit insurance or investor-protection scheme
• Thinner books than the underlying stock market
• Liquidation risk on every leveraged position

The web app opens on a live BTC terminal without a sign-in. The first order you place starts a $1,000 paper session on the same screens, the same venues and the same live prices as real trading, so you can see whether the instrument suits you before an account, a wallet or a deposit exists. Sign in when you want to keep the session, fund the wallet when you want to trade for real.