Robinhood's Vlad Tenev launches AI trading agents, 24/7 stock trading, and perps at Hood Summit

Speaker 3: Alright. Awesome.

Speaker 15: Thank you.

Speaker 2: We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Our next guest is Vlad Tenev, the CEO and cofounder of Robinhood here to discuss artificial intelligence, finance, everything in between. How you doing, Vlad? Welcome to the show.

Speaker 6: What's up dudes?

Speaker 1: Sorry. I'm I'm too focused on the car. Yeah. You got a yellow Toyota. As much as I'm excited to see you this

Speaker 2: Break it down. Explain where you are and what you're doing.

Speaker 6: So I'm in Houston, Texas

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 6: At our space themed active trader event. Called hood summit engines of creation where we have 1,500 of our most engaged active traders.

Speaker 2: Cool.

Speaker 6: We rolled out 16 products, which are awesome, like first of their kind. You know, twenty four seven trading of stocks will be the first place in The US that allows that. Perps, the first true perps offering in The US with Mhmm. Eight perpetual futures. And then Robinhood Agents, is an evolution of our agentic financial superintelligence products. We also sponsor twenty three eleven racing, a NASCAR team. So behind me is Corey Himespar, and I don't know if you guys are NASCAR fans. So we're we're America's brokerage, so it's only it's only appropriate for us to be involved in American motorsport.

Speaker 2: That's great. That's great.

Speaker 1: Delivery looks fantastic. Yeah. Easy to spot.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Talk about

Speaker 6: I mean, these cars don't have doors. You have to like jump in the window. To me.

Speaker 1: Have you driven have you driven it yet? Have they let you behind the wheel?

Speaker 6: Was trying. I was Okay. I was trying to do shit. I don't think yeah.

Speaker 1: I don't Might be a little worried.

Speaker 6: Corey didn't let me.

Speaker 2: Maybe the safety car. You take the safety car for a spin. Talk talk to me about the AI agents product. Yeah. Talk to me about the AI agents product. How much of this is pull versus push in the modern era? I mean, we're seeing this happen with the personal AI agents. Just yesterday, people were getting the the reversal. They were going to instinct for shopping and then yesterday they were starting to get ideas and recommendations for products they wanted to buy, push them. Some pushback on that. But in an agentic trading sense, I feel like if I'm on Robinhood, I kind of want you to come to me and say, hey, why do you have your money in this savings account that's earning 1% when you could be in this thing that earns 3%? Want me just to do that for you? So in terms of like trade ideas generated by the AI agent that comes to the customer versus me going and saying like, I want you to go and run my portfolio this way. What's working? Where do you see it going?

Speaker 6: Yeah. So I think there's lots of different types of agentic finance products Yeah. That have been tried. Agentic trading is a little bit different than what you're talking about, which is just like almost like a one time, hey, move my money over to where it earns higher interest. You don't need super intelligence for that. Robinhood Agents is really about helping people create strategies. Mhmm. And so we rolled out three things. Right? One is Robinhood Agents Mhmm. Which you can think of as, you know, we we rolled out an MCP a couple of months ago, a model context protocol, which you you can think of as an API that lets you connect external AI agents, like your Claude code or your Codex, Yep. To our services so that they could place trades on your behalf. Mhmm. That was a very popular product. It has over a 150,000 users have actually connected external agents to it. Mhmm. And so Robinhood Agents brings that within Robinhood with all the benefits like trade approvals, separate account, brings it in the Robinhood experience where we have over 28,000,000 accounts. Mhmm. The second thing is agent apps. Now if you think about what a lot of hedge funds have access to, it's proprietary data. Things like unusual options flows, satellite imagery, you know, congressional trading data. And agent apps, can think of as an app store

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 6: Where third parties can plug in, provide proprietary data for use by our customers in creating trading strategies. Mhmm. The third thing we created, agent loops. So you can have your agent run autonomously and predictably in a deterministic way and execute that strategy for you while you sleep.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: So you put these three things together, and the way I describe it is we wanna give you the power of a hedge fund in your pocket, an extremely sophisticated team of financial trading professionals. Can we give that to everyone? And, yeah, I I think the way that I think about it, you know, my my the start of my financial career was in algorithmic trading. And in the same way that tools like Clogcode and Codex have made it easy for anyone to be a programmer, Robinhood Agents will make it easy for anyone to be a financial trading quant. So you can you can develop a quant trading strategy, extremely sophisticated trading algo, and we can kind of unlock that for millions of people.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So

Speaker 1: What's going on in in alternative data? When you you said satellite imagery, you brought that up. I thought it was interesting because historically, I imagine, you know, a a some type of research organization or a hedge fund would get satellite imagery and then they would need to spend a lot of time actually analyzing the, you know, the the data. Let's say if you wanted to understand like retail foot traffic at a big box store. Right? You would be able to look and and and understand. The models out of the box can do a lot of the kind of things now that that it would have historically taken like building your own algorithms that maybe weren't as reliable, things like that to to to sort of extract alpha out of something like a satellite image. Now it feels like that kind of a thing can be way more democratized. Do you expect there to be like that sort of alternative data to just become more democratized now that models out of the box can do this kind of like complex research?

Speaker 6: Well, still need to pay for the data. Right? And and so Yeah.

Speaker 1: But that's have 28 Yeah. You guys have 28,000,000 accounts. Like, it feels like these are the kind of things that could ultimately be in fact crowdfunded one way or another or brought down to like a $5 Yep. A $5 subscription instead of like a $50,000

Speaker 2: subscription. And

Speaker 6: and these things are kind of like skills in in our product. So instead of having to go and sign up for it in the Internet and give your agent your username and password, they're just directly integrated. And our partners are all offering these services one month free. We also have a partnership with OpenAI where they're helping us with GPT six Luna. That'll be offered for free till the end of the year. Cool. And a lot of people say, well, what is this? People are just going to write to their agent and say, make me money. Yeah. Me And everyone's gonna be doing that. Yeah. I think what's likely to happen is you'll you'll get more depending on what you put in. So you mentioned the satellite data. You know, imagine exactly what you were saying. Someone actually plugging that in and saying, you know, check out these parking lots and and build me a proxy for retail traffic on the holiday season. Or my favorite, look at the parking lots of various companies and see which ones have employees working weekends or late nights, you know, and you can imagine the possibilities there. There's there's there's lots of strategies that are just waiting to be created. Think it'll unlock a whole new kind of arena for competition and creativity among traders.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. You you you described it as sort of like a hedge fund in your pocket, and I'm wondering if you can extend the analogy further. A lot of the most performant hedge funds run the pod model with centralized risk strategies and multiple pods with different strategies. Do you imagine that the more proficient Robinhood trader in the future will have multiple agents running multiple strategies with some sort of centralized risk control? Because there's often these ideas that you just listed a bunch of them. They sound exciting, but I don't know if I want to put all my eggs in that basket. But maybe as part of an ensemble strategy, it does start to make sense. So how far are you leaning into the hedge fund metaphor?

Speaker 6: Yeah. I mean, so right now, the way Robinhood is organized as a product is there's multiple accounts.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: And this is a relatively new thing. It started out with you just had one Robinhood account. Yeah. But then we rolled out retirement. Mhmm. Then we have joined and trust. And so there's an agentic account. So your AI agent is kind of sandboxed and scoped financially to one financial account. And by default, we've got some guardrails, right? Trade approvals are on by default. You can turn it off, but by default you would have to say yes to every trade that it suggests.

Speaker 2: Got

Speaker 6: it. You also have to move money into your account willingly. Right? Yeah. So it's not just gonna go in your in your retirement account and trade for you. The trading is all scoped to money and assets that you load into the account. Mhmm. And these are all things where Yeah. We wanted to start with a sandboxed experience. We wanted to see how things go. Of course, we might change it over time. But, yeah, that that's sort of our initial risk management strategy.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: And, you know, we'll see how it evolves. Over time, you could imagine you could have, like, a different type of agent that's not a trading agent, but more of like a financial controller that can allocate between different accounts. They can help you with budgeting. They can help you do sort of like these high level one time management functions. And, you know, that could also serve a risk management layer between your different trading agents. But for now, we're kind of keeping those ideas separate.

Speaker 1: When John said pod, it made me think, is like there a reason like, have you experimented with having like a group chat or a hint like, let's say three friends be able to jointly fund an account and then all effectively be making the same trades or be like having to agree on on a set of trades and running like

Speaker 2: Yeah. Like an investment club.

Speaker 1: Yeah. An investing Basically an investing club. You have the social features on Robinhood now. Yeah. It feels like hard to do at a at a wider scale, but at least for peer to peer like actual friend groups. Is there any like is there anything like legal there.

Speaker 2: Well Or legal.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Technical challenge or like not possible because of for legal reasons?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: I I think you I think there's definitely opportunity to innovate and create new things. There there is actually like a construct called an investment club Yeah. That allows, you know, friends to pool money together, and there's there's like a sort of structure around that. We haven't gone there yet Mhmm. But we do have Robinhood Social which we launched for everyone last night. And basically what that allows you to do is to share ideas with kind of the the broader Robinhood community and it has a follower graph and Mhmm. You can also ensure that, you know, the trades that you're seeing on the platform, the p n l's, all of that is validated and and real. And then we make it easy when you see an idea to actually trade from that idea. And and and you can you can imagine, like, following different traders, learning from their ideas. We also added creators onto the platform. We have politicians, so you can follow their trades. And Mhmm. We're we're gonna we we've been evolving it very very rapidly. A lot of people here actually are Robinhood social users and love it. So I think you should expect us to continue exploring these ideas and just giving giving our traders what they want, what's most useful to them.

Speaker 2: I'd love for you to zoom out from Robinhood and the products that you're launching to the markets broadly because you have such an interesting perspective. I mean, yesterday, there was an IPO from Aura that was delayed. And at the same time, the market is massively up this year. Things feel very strong. How are you feeling about either the market strength or weakness, but just how are things changing? Are we in a new regime where an IPO needs to be 15x oversubscribed to get out successfully? Like what are you noticing where maybe it's not even good or bad, it's just something where you're like, oh, this is new. We're in a different era.

Speaker 6: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if we're in a permanently unique era for which there's no precedent. I've I've I've seen the market conditions change in different ways

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 6: On almost a weekly basis now, right? And I remember it wasn't too long ago that you guys covered the Figma IPO. Yeah. And it felt like we were just at the absolute just apex of animal spirits at that point. And I think things have calmed down since then. Yeah. We've entered a bit of a crypto winter as well. But now that's now we're even starting to climb out of that. Crypto's had a bit of a moment the past couple of weeks. Prediction markets

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Have obviously been been going gangbusters. So I I think there's always something going on in some corner of the market. And as we've been adding more and more asset classes like perps, we added these really interesting products that I think you guys will like. We're gonna be the first ones offering prediction markets on earnings the So you'll be able to trade contracts on company EPS and revenue as well as, you know, things like iPhone deliveries, Tesla deliveries. And, you know, that that'll give customers all kinds of new abilities to like, if you want to hedge your position in a stock that you're long and you don't want to have to sell it, but you you might think they miss earnings or something, you'll you'll be able to kind of use these products. So a lot

Speaker 1: of people have had the experience of like, you know, being being long into earnings, being right that the that's an earnings beat, but then some other factor

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Sends the stock down.

Speaker 2: Oil prices went up and rate hikes or something.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Being able to right.

Speaker 6: Our traders. So these products allow you to more specifically Yeah. Execute on a on a trading strategy. So it's a little bit more pointed and Yeah. Sort sort of like yeah. More specific.

Speaker 2: How are you thinking about the knock on effects of AI agents entering the financial markets, research markets, trading markets? When you play back the story of Robinhood, if you had a crystal ball, you might have been able to predict GameStop and meme stocks and Reddit. But there's already been some people who have said, oh, well, in a world where AI agents are moving money around, no one will be in the money markets. There will be a bank run. And there are some concerns about how things will play out. Maybe you won't need a financial adviser anymore. But a financial adviser, of course, doesn't just allocate your portfolio. They do a lot of other stuff. And so I'm wondering if looking to the future and seeing any emerging trends that might sort of change the underlying structure of the financial markets over the next couple of years as AI rolls out to trading?

Speaker 6: Yeah. I think it's important to separate kind of the hype from the potential there. I think a lot of these things are sort of like one time use cases. Right? Move my money from a

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: You know, low yielding savings account to a high yielding money market account.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Or, you know, renegotiate my my cable bill or something like that. And and I think what we've seen is there's really one area that has long term retentive usage right now, and and that's agentic trading.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 6: Right? And so we're just kind of focusing all of our efforts on making agentic trading as great as possible. And I think over time, you'll see us exploring other things that are maybe not there yet in terms of usage and utility. But AgenTic Trading has like clear product market fit and utility now. So I think I think that's gonna be the one at least for a while.

Speaker 2: Well, it's exciting. I'm I'm excited to see how people use it. All the different screenshots I'm sure we'll see of people doing all sorts of

Speaker 1: No. I remember when the Robinhood social beta like started screenshots started to be shared to that and it was wildly entertaining. So I'm excited. I'm very excited for open access.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Mean, there'll be some people that put up insane numbers, some people that get wiped that that, you know No crying. At the yeah. No crying.

Speaker 1: No crying in the market.

Speaker 2: At the long tail, you get crazy crazy stories. Yeah. So you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on congratulations on the launches and we'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Our best everyone Always

Speaker 6: a pleasure guys.

Speaker 1: A great weekend. We'll talk

Speaker 2: to you soon. Of my b o's, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it.