The company hopes Robinhood Social, which resembles Twitter, will help it attract investors to its brokerage platform and keep them engaged. Customers who sign up for Robinhood Social will be able to follow other Robinhood traders, discuss strategies and market moves, and share verified trades.
In addition to the social-media platform, Robinhood also said it is adding new features, such as customized financial indicators and overnight index options, to Robinhood Legend, the desktop trading platform the company unveiled a year ago.
The announcements come as Robinhood seeks to maintain a steady drumbeat of product launches and brisk growth. It may also help maintain Robinhood stock’s red-hot momentum. Shares of the brokerage firm are up 215% this year and 496% over the past 12 months, and Robinhood is also joining the S&P 500.
The stock has skyrocketed as Robinhood rolls out more features, products, and services in a bid to win more wallet share with its millions of customers. The company once known for its free-trading app now offers a credit card, a banking app, and wealth management services.
“Robinhood is no longer just where you trade—it’s your financial superapp,” said Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who has set goals for the company to be the No. 1 platform for active traders and to win more wallet share with next-generation investors.
Expanding its suite of products and services, such as by adding retirement accounts and launching Robinhood Legend, has accelerated the company’s growth and enticed customers to move more of their assets to Robinhood’s platform.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company had a record 26.5 million funded customers at the end of the second quarter, up 2.3 million from the same period a year ago. Average platform assets per customer rose to $10,500 from $5,800 for the second quarter of 2024 and $3,800 for the second quarter of 2023.
Even as it makes strides toward its goals, Robinhood faces fierce competition for active traders, a highly desirable segment of retail investors. Traditional financial services companies such as Charles Schwab and relatively new entrants such as eToro and Webull are also vying for these customers, who tend to use more of a brokerage firm’s services than buy-and-hold investors.
Robinhood is launching a social media network for investors, Robinhood Social, that will allow users to follow other Robinhood traders, discuss strategies and market moves, and share verified trades.
Social media connection. Active traders tend to use more than one brokerage platform. And they visit multiple social-media platforms, such as Reddit and X, for sharing and finding new investing ideas. The subreddit wallstreetbets, which became notorious during the meme stock craze, has 20 million members. The RobinHood subreddit has one million.
The brokerage firm may be able to better attract and retain active traders if it can foster a tight knit community with Robinhood Social as their meeting place. The company believes that since both traders and Robinhood Social users are verified (you have to have a brokerage account to sign up) that will give its social media network an edge over existing options where it’s hard to know if the information shared is true or not.
“If a customer chooses to share a trade, we can verify that the trade is real,” says Abhishek Fatehpuria, vice president of product management. “That offers a better product experience and a higher degree of trust for the customer that this thing actually happened.”
Importantly, the company isn’t aiming to create a generic social-media website; posts to Robinhood Social will have to be about investing or trading. “Over time we may expand the types of post you can make,” Fatehpuria says. “But every post you make has to be tied to a trade. Part of that is to make sure the platform stays on message.”
Many Americans, especially younger ones, rely on social media to help inform their trading, investing, and personal finance decisions. About 20% of U.S. adults said they used social media as a source of financial information and advice, according to a Gallup survey released earlier this year. For younger adults aged 18 to 29, that figure was 42%. Additionally, 23% of young adults say they follow personal finance content creators on social media.
That Robinhood is launching a social-media platform at all might seem unusual, but executives say it’s long been on the company’s wishlist. “It’s something we have talked about every year in the nine years I have been here,” Fatehpuria says. “It’s always a conversation, ‘Is this the year to do social?’”
For years, the answer was no as other priorities took precedence. Today the company is operating from a stronger position, with several major initiatives completed, such as the launch of Robinhood Legend at last year’s active trader conference, Fatehpuria says.
For now, Robinhood Social is invite-only. The company plans to open the network to more customers early next year. Robinhood says it will be available at no additional cost.
Trading platform improvements. With the AI-powered investing assistant Robinhood Cortex, the company says it will be easier for active traders to analyze trends, research trades, and identify new opportunities.
In addition, users will be able to trade more futures products including S&P 500, oil, Bitcoin, and gold. They will also be able to ladder futures trades on Legend (this feature is already available on Robinhood’s mobile app). And Robinhood will give users the ability to build custom indicators and scans, which some investors use for identifying trading opportunities. Executives say these are among the most commonly requested features from users.
“Last year when we launched Legend, we had a lot of folks at the events asking when we could add custom indicators. At first we thought it was a niche audience asking for it, but even after the event we had people asking us,” says Swaroon Sridhar, lead product manager for indicators and scans by Robinhood Cortex. “Some people said they wouldn’t even use the platform until they could have their custom indicators. So we realized we needed to support that if we wanted to win that audience.”
The company is also enabling Robinhood Cortex to help users build and design their custom indicators. It was inspired to do so in part because of Robinhood staff’s frustrations trying to build custom indicators using existing online tools, says Swarin, who adds that they weren’t easy to use especially for novice investors.
“We felt it would be a classic Robinhood moment if we could take something that is pretty elite and democratize it by making it available to a much broader audience,” he says.
Custom indicators and scans by Cortex will launch early next year to subscribers of Robinhood’s Gold subscription service, which costs $5 a month or $50 annually.
In addition, Robinhood will enable users to sync their mobile devices with Robinhood Legend, effectively allowing them to monitor charts on their desktop screens while placing trades on their mobile devices.
“Some users like to just execute trades on mobile, and not just equity trades, but also options trades,” says Gina Pasqua-Abeles, senior director of brokerage product management.