Robinhood will let you trade stocks on weekends and bet on earnings reports

Why it matters: this is the first time Robinhood has offered weekend trading for US equities. Orders will route through the Bruce Alternative Trading System (ATS), an institutional-grade venue Robinhood says offers strong liquidity and execution quality.

The move fills a real gap. Robinhood's existing 24 Hour Market, launched in 2023, already extended trading into evenings and early mornings on weekdays, but it stopped at the weekend. This closes that remaining window, at least for the stocks and ETFs Robinhood selects for the program.

• What's covered: a selected list of US stocks and ETFs, not the full market.
• How it routes: through Bruce ATS rather than a traditional exchange.
• Status: the feature is subject to regulatory review before it goes live.

The catch: trading outside normal exchange hours carries real, well-documented risks that don't show up when the major exchanges are open and liquid.

With Wall Street's main markets closed, there are simply fewer buyers and sellers active at any given moment. Market makers can't hedge their own positions as easily during these windows, so they typically protect themselves by widening the gap between buy and sell prices.

What's next: for a retail trader, that usually means wider bid-ask spreads, more price uncertainty, and a higher chance of a trade filling at a worse price than expected. None of this is unique to Robinhood, it's a structural feature of any market with reduced participation, but it applies directly to the customers this weekend feature is built for.

In real life if you place a weekend order expecting Friday's closing price, don't be surprised if it fills meaningfully higher or lower, simply because fewer traders are around to meet you at that price.

Robinhood is also rolling out perpetual futures, crypto derivatives with no expiration date that let traders hold long or short positions indefinitely, through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp.

Eligible customers can trade perpetuals on Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, Cardano, Chainlink, and Hyperliquid. Leverage tops out at 10x for Bitcoin and Ether, and 3x for the rest.

By the numbers: Grace Q, Robinhood's Head of US Futures Products, said the company deliberately set lower leverage limits on the more volatile tokens: "We do know a lot of people who trade perps want the leverage." Capping leverage lower on assets that already swing harder in price is a direct acknowledgment that more leverage on more volatile assets compounds risk fast.

The Cboe partnership introduces binary contracts tied to specific corporate metrics, things like whether a company beats its revenue estimate, clears a specific earnings-per-share threshold, or hits a targeted unit-sales figure for a hot product.

This isn't buying or selling the stock itself. It's a direct wager on a data point tied to a company's earnings report, structured as a yes-or-no contract rather than a traditional options trade. It sits closer to a prediction market than to conventional stock trading, even though it runs through Robinhood's brokerage infrastructure.

Robinhood also introduced AI trading agents built on OpenAI or Anthropic models. Customers can set these agents to analyze markets, build watchlists, and trade stocks, options, or crypto on their behalf.

A feature called Loops lets users set standing instructions for the agent to follow automatically. By default, though, the agent needs the user's approval before executing each trade, and margin borrowing is disabled at launch. Gina Pasqua-Abeles, a senior director of product at Robinhood, said: "We do expect users to still have some level of oversight over what their agent is doing."

According to Robinhood, more than 150,000 agentic accounts have already been created through external infrastructure ahead of this native rollout, suggesting real existing demand for the feature.

Who's affected: customers comfortable letting software make trading decisions on their behalf are the intended audience here, not casual investors checking their portfolio once a month. The approval-required default and disabled margin borrowing at launch suggest Robinhood is easing into automated trading carefully, aware that letting an AI model act on real money carries obvious reputational risk if something goes wrong early on.

The big picture: Abhishek Fatehpuria, Robinhood's VP of Product, framed the entire announcement slate around a single goal: "One of our top priorities as a company is to be number one for active traders. We're not focused on one particular asset class over another."

That's a notable shift in emphasis. Robinhood built its early reputation on making investing simple and accessible for casual, first-time traders.

This wave of announcements, weekend trading, leveraged crypto derivatives, earnings wagers, and AI-driven automated trading, is squarely aimed at a different customer: frequent, sophisticated traders who want more markets open more often and more tools to trade them with.

Robinhood isn't making this push in a vacuum. Competitors including Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers, and Fidelity have all been expanding their own trading hours and product lineups, and Robinhood's stock closed at $116.21 on the day of the announcement, down a modest 0.21%.

Background: Robinhood was founded in 2013 by Stanford classmates Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, built around removing barriers that kept ordinary people out of financial markets. Zero-commission trading, launched in 2015, made the app popular with first-time investors who had never paid a brokerage fee before.

That popularity came with a defining controversy. In January 2021, a wave of retail buying organized on Reddit's WallStreetBets forum sent GameStop's stock soaring, inflicting billions in losses on hedge funds that had bet against it.

Robinhood restricted buying in GameStop and other so-called meme stocks during the frenzy, sparking outrage from customers, congressional scrutiny, and lawsuits that took years to resolve in the company's favor.

The big picture: that history makes this week's announcements a notable pivot. A platform once defined by first-time investors buying meme stocks with rules designed to protect the inexperienced is now actively building for a different customer.

Ones who want leverage, weekend access, and contracts that resemble prediction markets more than traditional investing. It's a bet that the active-trader segment is where Robinhood's next growth phase lives, even if it's a meaningfully different audience than the one that built the brand.