Robinhood is adding AI trading agents, crypto perpetual futures and weekend stock trading as it tries to win more business from active traders.
At its HOOD Summit on Tuesday in Houston, Texas, the brokerage said it will launch AI agents that can execute trades, offer crypto perpetual futures with up to 10x leverage, and open weekend trading for U.S. stocks. The company is also extending options trading hours, adding more intraday margin and introducing contracts tied to corporate earnings metrics.
Robinhood is making a clear pitch: active traders want access to more markets, longer trading windows and more ways to take risk, and the platform wants to keep that activity in-house rather than send users elsewhere.
"One of our top priorities as a company is to be number one for active traders," Abhishek Fatehpuria, vice president of product management, said in an interview. "We’re not focused on one particular asset class over another."
Weekend trading extends the 24 Hour Market
Robinhood launched its 24 Hour Market in 2023, but that service still stopped on weekends. The company now plans to close that gap by offering a selection of U.S. stocks and ETFs on Saturdays and Sundays through Bruce ATS, an alternative trading system.
Fatehpuria summed up the strategy in simple terms: "More assets, and then more hours."
Competition for active traders has been rising. Traditional brokers including Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers and Fidelity have expanded their product lineups to appeal to investors who have grown used to crypto exchanges operating without a closing bell.
Crypto trades around the clock every day of the year. That has put pressure on the U.S. equity market, which still centers on a weekday session even though brokerages and alternative trading systems have pushed stock trading well beyond the traditional 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. window.
Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have filed to extend trading hours. Robinhood is now taking its own schedule one step closer to an always-on model.
AI agents inside the app
The sharper break from the traditional brokerage model may come from Robinhood Agents, a product direction the company announced earlier this year.
Customers will be able to create an AI agent inside the app, choose a model from OpenAI or Anthropic, and give that agent access to a separate trading account. The agent can analyze markets, build watchlists and trade stocks, options and crypto.
Robinhood said the system will eventually be able to act repeatedly without waiting for a fresh prompt each time. A feature called Loops will let customers set standing instructions so an agent can monitor markets and execute a strategy when specified conditions are met.
The company said more than 150,000 agentic accounts have been created since it opened its trading infrastructure to outside AI agents earlier this year. Those accounts are generating millions of calls to Robinhood’s tools each day. The embedded version is meant to remove much of the technical setup that existed before.
The move also brings an obvious question: what happens when an AI model gets a trade wrong?
"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, said. "We do expect users to still have some level of oversight over what their agent is doing."
Robinhood said customers will, by default, have to approve every trade an agent proposes. Users can switch that protection off. At launch, agents will not be allowed to borrow on margin and will only be able to use funds placed in their dedicated account.
The company is also selling access to outside data that agents can use in their decision-making, including options data from Unusual Whales, market data from Nasdaq, crypto data from Token Terminal and government activity tracked by Quiver Quantitative.
Crypto perpetual futures for eligible U.S. customers
Robinhood’s move toward crypto-style trading goes deeper with perpetual futures.
Perps have become one of crypto’s dominant trading products because they allow traders to take leveraged long or short positions without the expiration dates attached to conventional futures. Historically, they have been associated with offshore crypto exchanges, while regulatory limits have kept them largely out of reach for U.S. retail traders.
Robinhood plans to offer perpetuals through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp, starting with crypto. Eligible U.S. customers will be able to trade bitcoin and ether contracts with up to 10x leverage, while other supported assets will start at 3x.
That leverage makes the product much riskier than simply buying crypto outright. A relatively small move against a highly leveraged position can trigger liquidation. Robinhood said it deliberately chose lower leverage for more volatile tokens and may adjust those limits over time.
"We do know a lot of people who trade perps want the leverage," Grace Q, the company’s head of U.S. futures products, said. "But we wanted to start off a little safer with especially the long-tail coins."
Earnings contracts and a cross-market account model
Robinhood is also expanding into another derivatives category with earnings contracts.
Offered through Cboe, the binary contracts will let customers trade directly on whether companies hit metrics such as revenue, earnings per share or, in Apple’s case, iPhone sales.
Alongside that, the brokerage is extending options trading hours and offering more intraday margin.
For Robinhood, these products all point to the same destination: an account where an active retail trader can move across stocks, crypto, options, prediction markets and leveraged derivatives while paying less attention to the traditional market clock.
"You can sell stocks and go buy crypto," Fatehpuria said. "You can sell crypto and go do prediction markets."
Crypto operated that way for years out of necessity. Now parts of that market structure are moving into mainstream finance.