Robinhood, which is already ‘back’, has very aggressive plans for 2025

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has a lot to celebrate this holiday season. After a difficult few years following Robinhood’s 2021 IPO – a period in which shares of the free trading software fell by more than 90% after suddenly halting trading in some meme stocks – the 12-year-old company just announced. Yahoo Finance’s “comeback” of the year.

When asked about this pride in recent days at Zoom, Tenev was bright. “When we were a young company just starting out, everyone was encouraging us,” said Tenev, who oversees about 2,500 employees at Robinhood. “Then at one point we started being taken for granted…the vibe got bad, (and) during the COVID, it got weird. (We) were growing like crazy, but people weren’t happy, and we went down, and now it’s been great.”

It’s what’s in the corner that Tenev is most excited about, though. Like many fintech entrepreneurs, they are excited about the Trump administration again, since the repeal is seen as a priority, as well as a warm embrace of cryptocurrency.

Unsurprisingly, they plan to take advantage of the rapidly changing environment. Indeed, during our conversation, we talked about “explosion” services provided are for crypto. We talked copyinga marketing strategy that allows customers to copy the products of another merchant. We also talked about the prediction markets, where Robinhood plans to compete more with private equity startups like Kalshi and Polimamarket which focuses on allowing people to bet on future outcomes.

You can listen to the whole thing Here; This time, below, you will find articles specifically about market predictions. This post has been lightly edited for length.

I see that one in 10 Americans (lending account holders) have a Robinhood account, yet you have one-third of all sales in the United States. Would that be correct?

I have never heard that number. I mean, it doesn’t sound crazy to me. There are billions (dollars) of things (in the world). Robinhood’s (AUM) is close to $200 billion, so we still have a long way to go. We’re bigger than when we started, but some of these guys, like the Schwabs and the Fidelitys, have $10 trillion in assets. So we are still growing, but our economy is growing 40% compounded year on year, not 2% to 3%.

When we finish a man sat downthis was a very small company trying to become a financial giant; you’re in financial management and cards. I wonder about new financial methods, such as prediction markets; How big of a chance do you think?

I’ve been a fan of prediction markets for a long time, and it was clear to me early on that political contracts are the best thing in that space, because (politics) are well known and closely related to market performance. useful as a hedge.

Another thing was: Everyone looks at the polls and the early results on election night to find out what’s going on, and if you’re looking at the news, the picture they paint isn’t clear, right? They are doing all this math for you and recording the votes (votes), but they are not telling you that there is a chance that one or the other will win the election. You contrast this with the prediction markets… And it’s a very useful story, not just a prediction, but actually a story.

We didn’t think it would be possible to set up (our presidential election market) in this election because there was a case with the (Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC), then Kalshi. he won In the 11th hour (offering contracts that pay like betting on US political elections), it’s a group he encouraged. We put in a lot of people, and we went from launch to shipping in about two and a half weeks…

Have you talked to Kalshi about the purchase?

I have spoken to Kalshi, not shopping. We finished the job Results ForecastEx (a CFTC-registered designated contract market (DCM) for futures contracts). And, this is a little technical, but we’re an FCM, a futures trader, which is like a client-facing part of a futures or swaps dealer, so we have to rely on the exchange to use it. as the end of all these trades. And we ended up using ForecastEx because they had all the permissions to do that. My understanding is that Kalshi only offers direct sales, unable to serve other FCMs.

I read that you have shown that migration to sports can be like competitive contracts.

I think this was a little removed. Indeed, our focus is on government-run contracts rather than traditional betting. Currently, event contracts do not allow game results (but) that may change.

You know, there will be a new CFTC Commissioner (and) many people interested in the game entering the federal laws of the country. I think those things can look very different from traditional sports betting. But yes, our focus is on event contracts. I think it’s going to be a big thing. The presidential election market proved to us that there is a huge demand for this type of product. We had over half a billion contracts sold in about a week (and over half a million people). So I think the first thing we heard after that was: Can we have more contracts? Could this be a supplement and not just a choice?

Obviously games can be big and endless. What other types of contracts are you considering?

There are many opportunities. Robinhood’s natural fit is financial. You can see examples of Fed hikes, Fed hikes…anything that’s on the news and financial markets is interesting to us. In my opinion, news has become mixed with entertainment.

There are two ways of looking at it (relationship of events). One is as a commodity, which active traders like to trade along with options and futures and other commodities. But the other is just the event, where, if you’re just looking for news, event contracts can be a way to deliver that to you in real time. We’re thinking about that as well, and I think it opens up more opportunities. You can have event contracts for everything from the Oscars and entertainment, sports to politics. And groups of event contracts are like sections of a newspaper, right? Art, style, entertainment, sports, business, (the) front page, which is real time. So you can compare the digital equivalent of a newspaper that is delivered through event contracts.

Again, for more information with Tenev, you can call Here.