Robinhood co-founder, chairman, and chief executive Vlad Tenev said retail investors are the real “smart money,” arguing that individual traders often stay closer to company fundamentals than institutions that rotate portfolios based on macro signals.
Speaking on the Master Investor podcast, Tenev covered Robinhood’s rise, the 2022 market drawdown, the current AI boom, tokenized assets, and his view that human traders will not be replaced by AI.
How Tenev reads the 2022 pullback
Tenev said he was skeptical during the pandemic period, even if he would not have called it a bubble outright. He pointed to large-scale money printing in the U.S. and stimulus checks sent to households, while inflation expectations implied by measures such as the 10-year Treasury market stayed around 2%.
That gap did not make sense to him. By late 2021, inflation had started to climb sharply, eventually reaching 9% to 10%, which in his view made tighter monetary policy and rate hikes unavoidable.
He also tied the meme-stock surge in January 2021 to the fiscal stimulus that had arrived only weeks earlier. According to Tenev, Robinhood’s own data showed that market inflows tended to jump within days or weeks after stimulus checks were distributed.
He said the setup was reinforced by several conditions at once: people had fewer places to spend money, more time at home to learn about investing and follow finance creators, and a zero-rate backdrop after the Federal Reserve cut rates back to zero in 2020.
Why he says retail is the real smart money
The host noted that more investors now describe retail as the real smart money, citing episodes in October 2022, April 2025, and March 2026 when individuals bought market weakness.
Tenev said that view matches his own. He argued that institutional investing has become more indirect and abstract, with managers adjusting positions based on macro data and policy changes rather than business-level developments.
As an example, he said companies such as Palantir can be sold for macro allocation reasons even if tariffs do not directly hurt the business and may even help it.
Retail investors, by contrast, tend to ask simpler but still serious questions: whether a company is executing well, whether they like the product, whether revenue is growing, whether margins are improving, and how the Rule of 40 looks. That focus, he said, can make them more resilient when tariffs or rates dominate headlines.
Why today looks different from 2020 and 2021
Asked whether current trading behavior resembles the period before the 2022 correction, Tenev said Robinhood customers today are mostly buying companies with real earnings power and leadership positions in their sectors. He mentioned SpaceX, Nvidia, Tesla, and other chip companies.
He contrasted that with what he called a “nostalgia” trade during the pandemic era, when many Robinhood users bought names such as GameStop, movie theaters, airlines, and rental-car companies. Even in the most optimistic case, he said, those businesses were not on the frontier of technology and in some cases were being disrupted themselves.
Now, he said, customer interest is centered more on companies actively reshaping industries. People can debate price-to-earnings multiples and other valuation metrics, but he said those businesses are still changing the world.
IPO markets closed, then reopened
Robinhood was founded in 2013 and went public in July 2021 at a market value of about $32 billion. The host noted that in 2022 the stock fell about 80% at one point, taking the company’s value to roughly $6 billion. Today, Robinhood’s market capitalization is near $100 billion, slightly above $90 billion, with $380 billion in assets under custody.
Tenev said the IPO window was effectively shut for years. Because Robinhood later launched IPO Access, he said the company had a close view of the market. He pointed to ARM and Instacart as early signs of reopening in 2023, while saying the broader reopening came last year.
On the AI boom, he said the debate is more complicated than earlier market cycles because many AI companies already have clear business models and real revenue. Foundation model companies sell tokens to businesses and consumers, and OpenAI has a subscription business of meaningful scale.
The harder question, he said, is whether customers that are spending heavily on AI today will move from a phase of learning and experimentation into one where return on investment is measured more strictly. That shift would determine whether revenue per customer keeps rising or starts to compress.
Even so, he said the market still has a long runway because many enterprises and consumers have not truly begun using AI yet.
The three reasons Robinhood broke through
Tenev said Robinhood’s early traction came from three forces working together.
- Commission-free trading. At the time, rival brokers were charging about $7 to $10 per trade, while Robinhood charged nothing. That pulled in younger users with less starting capital and active traders who could save heavily through zero commissions.
- Mobile-first design. Tenev said Robinhood helped lead the brokerage industry’s shift to mobile by building around the phone from the start, rather than treating mobile as an add-on.
- A message that resonated after the 2008 financial crisis. He said many younger users felt finance had created the problem while society paid the price, and that the gains from recovery flowed back to insiders and asset owners. Robinhood’s answer, he said, was broader ownership and wider participation in the system.
He framed that mission around ownership itself, saying a future that belongs only to a few is fragile, while broad asset ownership supports a freer, more stable, and more prosperous society.
Stock ownership can still rise much further
Tenev said U.S. equity-market participation is still far from saturated. He put current stock ownership at about 65% of Americans, or roughly two-thirds of the population.
He referred to an Acquired podcast episode on Vanguard, saying the spread of 401(k) plans helped lift stock participation from about 20% to nearly 50%. After a pause following the global financial crisis, he said Robinhood helped move that figure from the low 50s to the low 60s, and higher still.
His question now is whether the U.S. can move from the 60% range to above 90%. He said that will depend in part on reaching people who do not have access to employer-sponsored 401(k) plans and getting them into brokerage accounts earlier in life.
He cited Robinhood’s partnership with BNY Mellon as the exclusive initial broker and custodian for the U.S. Trump Accounts program, which he said will open brokerage accounts for every newborn in the country and invest from birth in a diversified basket of public companies.
He also said the U.K. remains much less penetrated, with only about one in six people owning stocks. In his view, the country has not yet had its own zero-commission transformation.
Robinhood Chain and the push into tokenized stocks
On crypto, Tenev described Robinhood Chain as an Ethereum Layer 2 built with Arbitrum technology and aimed squarely at real-world assets.
He said crypto has long been associated with assets such as Bitcoin and meme coins that do not represent things in the real world. Robinhood’s strategy over the past year and more, he said, has been to ask whether blockchain can become infrastructure for real assets that already have clear value and utility.
At an event in Cannes, France, Robinhood laid out a long-term tokenization roadmap. Tenev compared tokenization to stablecoins, saying stablecoins made dollars easier to access around the world, while tokenized assets can do the same for exposure to U.S. equities.
Robinhood plans to launch stock tokens on Robinhood Chain in more than 120 countries and regions. Users will be able to access them through non-custodial wallets or Robinhood Wallet. The first phase will cover about 2,000 U.S.-listed stocks and offer 24/7 trading.
He also stressed portability. In his telling, users would no longer be tied entirely to a single broker as counterparty, because the tokens could move and be exchanged as long as the chain remains active.
Backed 1:1 by real assets
When asked whether those stock tokens would be synthetic or backed by actual holdings, Tenev said Robinhood will maintain one-to-one backing with real underlying assets.
He said that structure is intended to keep users’ exposure secure even if Robinhood itself were to face problems. He added that the company made the architecture clearer as it reintroduced the product.
Private markets are the next major fight
Tenev also discussed Robinhood Ventures, which he said is built to give retail investors access to private companies through traditional finance structures. The vehicle uses a closed-end fund model that he likened to a publicly traded venture capital firm.
According to Tenev, the fund has already invested in a basket of private companies including Stripe, OpenAI, SpaceX before IPO, U.K. fintech firm Revolut, and other businesses.
He said Robinhood will respect issuer preferences while also putting shareholder interests first. Over time, he said, issuers will come to accept that broader retail access to private-company exposure is becoming a standard expectation.
His closing investment point followed the same line. Tenev said more value creation is now being captured by a smaller group of wealthy insiders, making it harder for ordinary investors to buy companies at the kind of early valuations once seen with Microsoft or Amazon and then earn 1,000x or even 10,000x in public markets.
That is why, he said, private markets need to be opened up more widely. He called the democratization of private equity and private-company access Robinhood’s next major crusade.
AI changes tools, not the human role
On AI and trading, Tenev said he has a long-held belief that humans will always trade. He began his career in high-frequency trading, which he described as one of the earliest applications of what would now be grouped under AI, though the term at the time was machine learning.
He said high-frequency firms were already buying GPUs early, including NVIDIA CUDA-based accelerators and Tesla cards, to price securities and build algorithms.
Markets are already electronic and quant firms already run increasingly sophisticated strategies, he said. Yet despite repeated predictions that automation would swallow the market, retail trading came roaring back with Robinhood.
The more interesting question, in his view, is whether tools once reserved for top hedge funds and high-frequency firms can be opened to everyday investors without requiring a computer science degree.
Asked whether markets could become perfectly efficient if every retail trader had the same AI agent and simply turned on auto-trading, Tenev said no. If everyone uses the same AI, he said, the edge from using it shrinks. That would create space again for human discretion.
His bottom line was simple: financial markets are too complex, dynamic, and chaotic for humans to disappear. The balance between people and AI, he said, will remain.