Robinhood Legend for Options Trading: How I Set It Up and Use It

If you trade options on Robinhood and you’re still doing everything in the phone app, you’re making life harder than it needs to be. Robinhood Legend is Robinhood’s desktop platform, and once you set it up properly, you can see your chart, the full options chain, your positions and orders all on one screen.

In this guide I’ll walk you through how I set up Legend for options trading, the features I use every day, and a couple of newer ones that make it even better.

What is Robinhood Legend?

Legend is a completely separate platform, built from the ground up, but it’s linked to your normal Robinhood account. Same money, same positions. You open it from Robinhood on the web and it launches in a new browser tab.

And it’s free with your Robinhood account. A lot of other charting platforms charge a subscription for the indicators and tools you get here. That alone makes it worth setting up.

Setting up your layout

When you open Legend, you can start from a blank layout or from a template. Templates are fine to look around, but I’d build your own options layout. It takes five minutes:

Here’s what that looks like once it’s together:

Reading the options chain in Legend

If you’re used to the Robinhood app, the chain in Legend looks different at first. It’s the classic chain you’ll find on most other brokers: calls on the left, puts on the right, strikes down the middle, and the in-the-money side shaded.

The big win is that you see everything at a glance. In the app you have to tap each strike to see its price. Here, with open interest and volume as columns, you can spot the most liquid strike in a second. When I looked at Apple, one strike had over 10,000 contracts of open interest and the highest volume. That’s the strike where your orders get filled at a fair price.

Placing a spread straight from the chain

This is my favourite part. To place a spread, you don’t go through five screens. You click sell on one strike and buy on the next, and Legend builds the two-leg order for you.

Then set your limit price, review and submit. That’s it. Spreads need Level 3 options approval on Robinhood. And one thing I’d love Robinhood to add here: the app shows you a profit and loss graph when you build a trade, and the order ticket in Legend didn’t at first. That’s where simulated returns come in.

Newer features worth knowing

Robinhood keeps improving Legend. It’s still not quite at the level of the platforms built for day traders, but it’s getting there. Two additions I use:

The focused chain

If you prefer the way the chain looks in the app, click the three dots on the options chain widget and choose Focused chain. It shows one expiration at a time, just like the app.

The nice trick is to use both. Keep the classic side-by-side chain in one widget to scan all the expirations, then use a focused chain in a second widget once you know which expiration you’re trading.

Simulated returns and the Greeks

This one is great for multi-leg trades. Build a strategy on the chain, say an iron condor, and click Simulated returns. You get a profit and loss graph with the combined Greeks for the whole position.

Then there’s a date slider. Move it forward and you see how the position’s profit changes as time passes, with theta working for you if you’re the seller. There’s an IV slider too, so you can see what happens if implied volatility jumps or drops tomorrow.

Before you place a trade, play with those two sliders for a minute. It teaches you more about how the Greeks actually move an option’s price than any definition will. If you want the basics first, start with my option Greeks guide.

My Legend options checklist

If you trade options seriously, Legend is worth the five minutes it takes to set up. If you have any questions about a specific feature, put them in the comments on the videos and I’ll answer.

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