Finance29 September, 20262 min read
Robinhood Unveils Robinhood Agent, 10x Crypto Leverage, and Weekend US Stock Trading
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Robinhood introduced AI trading agents powered by OpenAI/Anthropic to execute trades. It launched crypto perpetual futures with up to 10x leverage for US users.
AI agents and perps
Robinhood unveiled Robinhood Agent at its HOOD Summit in Houston, Texas, describing an AI trading agent that can analyze stocks, options and digital assets and execute orders based on conditions set by users. Digital-asset perpetual futures will be offered to U.S. users, with Bitcoin and Ether leverage of up to 10 times and other digital assets initially capped at up to three times. Abhishek Fatehpuria, Robinhood's vice president of product management, said, "One of the company's top priorities is becoming the best platform for active traders," as the brokerage positioned the new tools as a way to win more active investors.
Robinhood also said it would extend U.S. stock trading to weekends, effectively creating a seven-day-a-week trading environment for some stocks and exchange-traded funds. Robinhood said it would let customers connect AI models from OpenAI or Anthropic to their brokerage accounts so the agent can research markets and then place trades.
Weekend trading shift
Robinhood said it will let users trade some U.S. stocks round-the-clock during weekends, marking its latest effort to keep up as the industry moves toward wider access. Robinhood has allowed round-the-clock trading during the weekdays since 2023, and the company said as much as 25% of the total daily trading volume on busy days came from outside traditional hours. SEC Chair Paul Atkins said at a roundtable earlier this month, "waiting to adjust a position or rebalance a hedge until the clock strikes 9:30" may beget missed opportunities or additional risk.
Robinhood said it will initially offer a curated list of stocks and exchange-traded funds for weekend trading through Bruce ATS, and the feature is pending regulatory review. Robinhood also said it would allow traders to wager on specific corporate earnings metrics through a partnership with derivatives exchange Cboe.
Guardrails and scale
More than 150,000 agentic accounts have been created since it opened its trading infrastructure to outside AI developers earlier this year, and it said agents are using Robinhood tools more than 30 million times daily. The embedded Robinhood Agents experience is designed to give users oversight, with Gina Pasqua-Abeles saying, "We do expect users to still have some level of oversight over what their agent is doing." Robinhood said it will default to requiring customers to approve every trade an agent proposes, and it said users can turn that protection off.
Robinhood said agents cannot borrow on margin at launch and can only access money placed in their dedicated account, and it said users can set limits on how much an agent can trade at a time. Robinhood also said usage on OpenAI GPT-Luna will be free until the end of the year, and it framed the rollout as bringing tools once reserved for hedge funds, big banks, and quant firms to a broader base of active traders.