A Multi-Pronged Push to Own the Active Trader
Robinhood is leaning heavily into the playbook that made crypto exchanges attractive to a new generation of investors. On Tuesday, the brokerage used its HOOD Summit in Houston, Texas, to unveil a bundle of new tools: AI agents capable of executing trades on the user's behalf, crypto perpetual futures offering leverage of up to 10 times, and weekend trading for a selection of U.S. stocks and ETFs.
The announcement also included extended options trading hours, expanded intraday margin, and new binary contracts that let customers wager directly on corporate earnings metrics. Taken together, the moves reflect a clear strategic thesis: active traders want more markets, longer sessions, and more levers for taking risk — and Robinhood intends to keep them in-house rather than watch them drift to offshore venues.
"One of our top priorities as a company is to be number one for active traders," Abhishek Fatehpuria, vice president of product management, told reporters. "We're not focused on one particular asset class over another."
That positioning arrives amid intensifying competition. Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers, and Fidelity have all broadened their product lines in recent months, courting the same cohort of investors who grew up expecting markets to operate around the clock. Crypto assets have traded 24 hours a day, seven days a week for years, and that norm has put visible pressure on the U.S. equity market, which still largely confines trading to a weekday window. Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have filed proposals to extend their sessions, and Robinhood itself launched a 24-Hour Market in 2023 — though that service still pauses over the weekend. The new offering, routed through Bruce ATS, an alternative trading system, is designed to close that remaining gap by letting customers trade select equities and ETFs on Saturdays and Sundays.
Fatehpuria summed up the approach simply: more assets, more hours.
AI Agents Powered by OpenAI and Anthropic
Perhaps the most structurally significant addition is Robinhood Agents, a feature the platform first teased earlier this year. Customers will be able to spin up an AI agent inside the Robinhood app, choosing a foundation model from either OpenAI or Anthropic. Each agent gets its own isolated trading account and can analyze market data, compile watchlists, and execute trades across stocks, options, and crypto.
A feature called Loops will let users give an agent standing instructions — for example, monitor a set of conditions and trigger a predefined strategy when those conditions are met — so the agent can operate repeatedly without waiting for a fresh prompt each time.
Demand for agent-style trading is already measurable. Robinhood said more than 150,000 agentic accounts have been created since the company opened its trading infrastructure to outside AI models earlier this year, and those agents are generating millions of API calls to its tools on a daily basis.
The question of accountability when a model makes a wrong call is addressed by design. By default, every trade an agent proposes must be approved by the human user. That safeguard can be toggled off, but it is on out of the box. Agents also cannot borrow on margin at launch and are restricted to funds sitting in their dedicated account.
"I would think of the agent as an extension, like a trading tool that's mainly for research that can execute trades," Gina Pasqua-Abeles, senior director of product management, explained. "We do expect users to still have some level of oversight over what their agent is doing."
To enrich agent decision-making, Robinhood is also reselling access to third-party data feeds, including options flow from Unusual Whales, market data from Nasdaq, crypto metrics from Token Terminal, and government-activity tracking from Quiver Quantitative.
Perpetual Futures and Binary Earnings Contracts
Robinhood's foray into crypto-style derivatives goes further with perpetual futures — contracts that let traders hold leveraged long or short positions without the expiration dates that characterize traditional futures. Perps have become one of the most popular products on offshore crypto exchanges, but regulatory constraints have kept them largely out of reach for U.S. retail investors until now.
The new offering will run through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp, starting with crypto assets. Bitcoin and ether contracts will carry leverage of up to 10 times, while a broader set of supported tokens will start at three times. The company acknowledged that leverage dramatically increases risk: a modest adverse price move against a highly leveraged position can trigger liquidation. Robinhood said it deliberately capped leverage lower for more volatile, long-tail tokens and reserved the right to adjust those limits over time.
"We do know a lot of people who trade perps want the leverage," Grace Q, head of U.S. futures products at Robinhood, said. "But we wanted to start off a little safer with especially the long-tail coins."
On the equity-derivatives side, Robinhood is introducing binary earnings contracts offered through Cboe. These let customers trade directly on whether a company will hit a specific metric — revenue, earnings per share, or, in Apple's case, iPhone unit sales — turning a quarterly earnings release into a tradable binary event.
Crypto's Market Structure Moves Mainstream
All of the new products point toward a single destination: a single Robinhood account where an active retail trader can pivot between equities, crypto, options, prediction markets, and leveraged derivatives while largely ignoring the traditional market clock.
"You can sell stocks and go buy crypto," Fatehpuria said. "You can sell crypto and go do prediction markets."
For years, crypto markets operated with that level of interconnectivity out of necessity, with no alternative infrastructure available. Now, elements of that market structure — 24/7 access, perpetual leverage, and AI-driven execution — are steadily migrating into the mainstream brokerage landscape, reshaping what a retail trading platform is expected to offer.
