Robinhood takes four cuts of one retail trade

An AI trader that works nights and weekends

Name an agent, fund its account, put the phone down. At its Houston summit on 29 September 2026, Robinhood moved the AI trader inside its app↗: customers pick an OpenAI or Anthropic model, and the agent places equity, options and crypto orders on standing strategies called Loops ¹². Per-trade approval ships switched on; beside it sits the toggle that lets the agent trade alone ¹.

Three more launches followed, all aimed at the active trader ³. Weekend equities will route to Bruce Markets, a venue Robinhood is investing in alongside majority owner PEAK6, pending regulatory review↗ ⁴⁵. Bitcoin and ether perpetuals run at up to 10 times leverage through Bitstamp, the exchange Robinhood owns ⁴³. Cboe-listed contracts paying up to $1 on a beaten earnings metric arrive in coming weeks, still awaiting SEC approval ⁴³.

Every layer of the trade bills one company

Count the cuts: order flow on the agent's own trades, perp fees on Robinhood's exchange, event contracts on its clearinghouse venture, and the model bill inside every agent.

Agents placing equity and options orders feed lines that earned $129 million and $342 million last quarter ⁶. The perpetuals bill one basis point per trade through the end of 2026 on Bitstamp ³.

Event contracts, $156 million last quarter, have routed since June through Rothera, the CFTC-licensed venture with Susquehanna that generated $17 million of that revenue ⁷. The fourth cut is the model bill itself: Robinhood meters usage of OpenAI and Anthropic models, declines to say whether it shares that revenue, and runs OpenAI's GPT-Luna free through year-end to seed demand ¹. The Cboe earnings bets are the holdout, free of contract fees through the end of 2026 ³.

The bets already out-earn the stocks

Event contracts earned $156 million in the second quarter, past equities at $129 million and crypto at $100 million, second only to options, on a record 13.6 billion contracts traded ⁶⁸. The broker, the venue, the exchange and the AI's brain now bill one customer, in a record $1.31 billion quarter, up 32 percent↗ ⁶⁹.

The customer signs for the losses

Robinhood's guardrails are real: approval defaults on, agents spend only the separate account's funds, and any Loop pauses on command ¹³. Beyond that the customer is "responsible for their agents' trades," and Robinhood has not measured whether the agents outperform ¹. Some 150,000 agentic accounts have opened since May, tapping its tools nearly 30 million times a day ¹¹⁰.

The concern researchers raise sits one tab over, in the same app. University of Washington's Uttara Ananthakrishnan calls prediction markets "equally risky" to sports betting for problem gamblers↗; microbetting, she says, is "literally like a slot machine" ⁸.

The rules arrive after the launch

The weekend session awaits regulatory review, which PEAK6's Jenny Just already calls "the end of the five-day market" ⁵. Missouri has ordered Robinhood to drop sports event contracts↗, and its Nevada dispute has reached the Supreme Court on petition ⁷. New Jersey prices a proposed 9 percent surtax at $10.3–15.3 million for fiscal 2027 ⁸. Nasdaq, the NYSE and 24x are building 23-hour weekday sessions; New York last traded Saturdays in 1952 ⁴.

The tell: whether agent performance gets published before the autonomy toggle gets marketed.