Robinhood is borrowing more from the crypto playbook as it looks to win more business from active traders on its platform.
On Tuesday, at its HOOD Summit in Houston, Texas, the brokerage unveiled AI agents that can execute trades, crypto perpetual futures with up to 10 times leverage and weekend trading for U.S. stocks. It is also extending options trading hours, offering more intraday margin and adding contracts that let users trade on corporate earnings metrics.
The bet Robinhood is making is that traders want more markets, longer hours and more ways to take risk — and that it can give them those tools without sending them somewhere else.
“One of our top priorities as a company is to be number one for active traders,” vice president of product management, Abhishek Fatehpuria, said in an interview. “We’re not focused on one particular asset class over another.”
Competition for those customers has been growing. Traditional brokers such as Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers and Fidelity have expanded their trading products in order to appeal to a generation of investors who’ve been conditioned by crypto exchanges to expect markets that never close.
Crypto trades around the clock, every day of the year. This has put pressure on the U.S. stock market, which still trades around a weekday session, even as brokerages and alternative trading systems have expanded equity trading well beyond the traditional 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. window.
Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have filed to expand their trading hours, while Robinhood launched its 24 Hour Market in 2023. That service still stops on weekends. Robinhood now plans to fill that gap by offering a selection of stocks and ETFs on Saturdays and Sundays through Bruce ATS, an alternative trading system.
“More assets, and then more hours,” Fatehpuria said, describing Robinhood’s strategy.
Perhaps the bigger break with the traditional brokerage model comes from Robinhood Agents, which the trading platform announced earlier this year.
Customers will be able to create an AI agent inside the app, selecting a model from OpenAI or Anthropic, and give it access to a separate trading account. The agent can analyze markets, build watchlists and trade stocks, options and crypto.
It can eventually do that repeatedly without waiting for a new prompt. A feature called Loops will allow customers to give an agent standing instructions to monitor markets and execute a strategy when specified conditions occur.
Robinhood has already seen demand for a more technical version of the idea. More than 150,000 agentic accounts have been created since it opened its trading infrastructure to outside AI agents earlier this year, according to the company, generating millions of calls to its tools each day.
The embedded version removes much of that technical setup.
It also raises an obvious question: What happens when an AI model gets a trade wrong?
“I would think of the agent as an extension, like a trading tool that’s mainly for research that can execute trades,” Gina Pasqua-Abeles, senior director of product management, said. “We do expect users to still have some level of oversight over what their agent is doing.”
Robinhood will default to requiring customers to approve every trade an agent proposes. Users can turn that protection off. Agents cannot borrow on margin at launch and can only access money placed in their dedicated account.
Robinhood is also selling access to outside data that agents can incorporate into their decisions, including options information from Unusual Whales, market data from Nasdaq, crypto data from Token Terminal and government activity tracked by Quiver Quantitative.
The company’s push into crypto-style trading goes further with perpetual futures.
Perps have become one of crypto’s dominant trading products because they let traders take leveraged long or short positions without the expiration dates of conventional futures. They have historically been associated with offshore crypto exchanges, while regulatory constraints have limited their availability to U.S. retail traders.
Robinhood plans to offer eligible U.S. customers perpetuals through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp, starting with crypto. Bitcoin and ether contracts will offer leverage of up to 10 times, while other supported assets will start at three times.
The leverage makes the product considerably riskier than buying crypto outright. A relatively small move against a highly leveraged position can trigger liquidation. Robinhood said it deliberately chose lower leverage for more volatile tokens and could adjust the limits over time.
“We do know a lot of people who trade perps want the leverage,” the company’s head of US futures products, Grace Q, said. “But we wanted to start off a little safer with especially the long-tail coins.”
The brokerage is expanding into another type of derivatives trading with earnings contracts.
Offered through Cboe, the binary contracts will let customers trade directly on whether companies hit metrics such as revenue, earnings per share or, in Apple’s case, iPhone sales.
For Robinhood, all of these products point toward the same destination: an account where an active retail trader can move between stocks, crypto, options, prediction markets and leveraged derivatives while increasingly ignoring the traditional market clock.
“You can sell stocks and go buy crypto,” Fatehpuria said. “You can sell crypto and go do prediction markets.”
Crypto spent years operating that way by necessity. Now some of its market structure is making its way back into mainstream finance.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/09/29/robinhood-adds-ai-agents-perps-and-weekend-trading-in-push-to-win-active-traders.
