Em breve, na Robinhood: trading 24/7 e com agentes de AI

In just a few short years, Robinhood Markets has sparked a small revolution in the American investment market, breaking down barriers and reducing costs for small investors, prompting traditional Wall Street firms to react. Now, the California fintech firm is positioning itself for a deeper revolution by introducing artificial intelligence agents and round-the-clock trading.

In the near future, Robinhood app users will be able to trade certain stocks and ETFs on weekends. Trades will be executed through Bruce Markets, also known as Bruce ATS, a platform that allows off-hours trading. Steve Quirk, Robinhood's chief brokerage officer, explained that breaking news can occur at any time, and round-the-clock trading will enable clients to manage their portfolios in real-time.

The company recently invested in Bruce Markets alongside Peak6 Investments. The exact start date for seven-day-a-week trading has not been confirmed. Bruce Markets employs Nasdaq's trading infrastructure, while compensation, clearing, and custodial services are provided by Apex Clearing Corp. Apex Clearing is already one of Bruce's investors, alongside Fidelity Investments, Nasdaq Ventures, NH Investment & Securities, Tastytrade, and Webull.

The amount of the new investment has not been disclosed. In the near future, Robinhood clients will not only have the ability to trade 24/7, but they will also have artificial intelligence agents. The trading agent was a key focus of the company's presentations yesterday in Houston, according to the Wall Street Journal. Robinhood's founder and CEO Vlad Tenev stated that AI tools will provide platform traders with resources currently available only to large asset managers and quantitative funds.

Robinhood already allows tools from other companies, such as Claude from Anthropic, to be connected to users' accounts. A specific account type for AI trading has been created, and so far, over 150,000 clients have used this feature. Tenev told CNBC that the goal now is to make the AI tool available directly in the app, with access for all 28 million clients.

"We designed the product with security in mind from the start," Tenev said, ruling out the possibility of 'hallucinations' from the agents causing harm to users. "By default, the agent does the work, but the user authorizes the operation," he explained. "Some clients prefer to disable this option to allow the agent to operate completely autonomously and continuously, and this is possible.

However, the default setting keeps the need for operation approval active." According to Tenev, the agents work in an isolated environment (a sandbox) and in a separate account. "They cannot directly access your main balance or retirement account to make trades." Robinhood's app has already been considered a casino for crypto and meme stock speculators of Generation Z. However, in recent years, the company has consolidated itself as a diversified financial platform, with no single service being its main source of revenue.

The company now has 13 distinct businesses, each generating annual revenue over $100 million. In the last quarter, revenue reached a record $1.3 billion, a 32% increase compared to the same period last year. Robinhood's revenue from stock transactions, which was the company's core business, fell to $129 million; options trading generated $342 million.

Together, these two services account for over a third of quarterly revenue. According to Bloomberg, the platform will soon have linked-to-results contracts, a new type of CBOE Global Markets options that allow investors to bet on whether a company will exceed a specific performance indicator, such as sales volume. However, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must still approve these contracts.

Another new trading modality are perpetual futures – derivatives without an expiration date – of cryptocurrencies. These contracts will be available through Bitstamp, a crypto exchange acquired by Robinhood last year.