Welcome back to the 2025 Global Exchange and Trading Conference. I'm Patrick Moley, Senior Research Analyst covering the exchanges, brokers, and trading companies. That was a nice little fireside we had with Thomas Petterfy and Rich there. Happy to be joined by another brokerage company, Robinhood. We have Chief Brokerage Officer Steve Quirk here with us. Steve is a veteran in the brokerage industry, over 35 years of experience. Join Robinhood.
Oh, don't date me. Yeah. Feels like 20.
Feels like 20. You joined in January 2022 from Schwab, where you ran TD's platform. Thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
I think it's on a lot of people's minds because you put out a press release earlier this morning.
We did.
Maybe just to start off, can you give us kind of a state of the union on the retail trading environment, the health of the retail trader here? It seems like from your results in May, it was still pretty strong. Any insights you can kind of glean into what we're seeing here?
Sure. I think we get a lot of questions on the health of the retail customer. We've been doing a lot of media this week on it because it's top of mind. We did release some metrics this morning. In those metrics, sequentially, our equity volume grew 10%. That's a new record for Robinhood. Our option volume grew 5%. That's a new record for Robinhood on a monthly basis. Margin balances are as high as we've ever had them. Cash sweep is as high as we've ever had it. Then we gave a deposit number. Deposit number was $3.5 billion. The last two months were $7.5 billion and $6.8 billion. We're still on a run rate that's 40% higher than where we were last year. I think what happened there is there was a bit of a pull forward with all this market activity.
We saw that in both the deposits, but also in what our customers were doing. They were very strongly buying the dip. Obviously, they've been pretty well rewarded as a result of it. As I mentioned yesterday when we were doing some media, this is like the second occurrence where I would argue retail came to the rescue of the market. COVID probably the first. As a result, they were rewarded. I think the follow-up question is often, what if they buy the dip and it keeps going down, which is a legitimate concern. If you think of our customer base, they're early 30's. They have 30 more years to invest.
When they think about how they're going to invest, they approach it with a very different mindset than somebody who's 58 years old from a company that they may have come from, who is close to retirement.
I think it's easy to get lost in this minutiae of month-to-month trading activity with Robinhood. But when you really sit down and look at what you're building, it's pretty compelling. Since we talked at this conference a year ago, you've launched a number of new products, kind of kicked things off with the Gold event back in October. Can you just talk about how the offering has evolved over the last 12 months and the things you've implemented to really move it forward?
Yeah, I think, and I'll just focus on what I'll call the self-directed active trading side. We've done a lot. We set out a couple of years ago, well, we set out three and a half years ago where we looked at our most engaged customers, and they had the worst NPS score of any of our customers. We're like, this is not a model that you would like to see. We've reversed that. They now have the highest NPS. The way we did it is just by making the experience so much better for all of them by building all the things that they're looking for. We now have a web-based application called Legend. We have asset classes like futures, index options. We have industry-leading margin rates. Industry-leading, yes. I would say that.
You might not see that in some of our competitors' advertising, but we are industry-leading. We doubled our margin books since we did that. We have rolled out prediction markets. I think we just have a really healthy velocity and pace of innovation, and our customers appreciate that.
Yeah. I do want to get more granular on some of the products you laid out. The other piece of the story is the asset accumulation piece. I think it's fascinating that you have 1 in 10 American adults that have a Robinhood account, but you have less than a quarter % of the total retail assets in the U.S. How do you think about the ability to kind of monetize and grow that asset base over time? Maybe also as a follow-up to that, how does Trade PMR and this kind of introduction into the RIA channel aid in that?
That's actually the most exciting thing about Robinhood is when you look at where we are and how quickly we've gotten to where we are and the potential of where we can go. Basically what brought me to Robinhood is this is the next generation of investors. I grew up with that last generation. I guess I might be one of them. I pulled a Benjamin Button and came to Robinhood, followed my kids because they were all Robinhood customers. I think what makes it so exciting is they are the future of investing. In every facet of that, we get to build for them. We get to also, in some instances, start from scratch, like we did with our web-based app.
Like I looked at the best of what's been built in the industry and said, I don't have any legacy migrations or acquisitions where I have to cobble technology on top of other technology. I've done that many times, have been acquired and have acquired. It's kind of cool and refreshing to be able to do that. Now we have an avenue. We've done that on the self-directed side. I'd encourage you to read Bloomberg's report on options trading. That just came out with Larry Tabb and Jackson on where we stand with respect to the industry. We will be number one in terms of overall trading volume. We already are on the options side. You can see that. Equity side, it's coming pretty quickly. We can see our growth rates. That's all self-directed. We're competing very aggressively on the self-directed side.
We're on a path to be the number one firm. On the other side, the wealth management side, which is a multiple, it's probably three times the size of the self-directed side. We're just getting in there. That same disruption that happened on the self-directed side, you should anticipate it's coming on that side of the fence. What makes it really, what puts us in such a unique place is, again, I'll go back to it. There's a $124 trillion wealth transfer happening. They were talking about it on CNBC yesterday. What happens is, first of all, people are living very long today, which is a good thing. However, that means when they pass their wealth down, they don't necessarily pass it to their children. Their children are in their 60s. They might not need it. They're passing it down another generation.
81 % of those people fire that advisor right out of the gate. They all know that industry stat. We have the recipients of that wealth sitting at Robinhood, 26 million customers that are in the accumulation phase of wealth. They're actually starting to get in their prime earnings. They're going to be recipients of much of this. Advisors want access to establish a relationship with them. That's what we're building, a referral program that connects those two. Last week we were in Tampa at an event called Synergy, which is Trade PMR, the advisory firm we bought, their large conference. They had double the number of people in that room. A lot of them are advisors that don't custody with Trade PMR currently, hundreds of billions of dollars. They're interested, very interested in establishing a relationship with our customers.
I think we're going to see some really cool things come out of that.
Anything you can share in terms of the pace of expected expansion of the advisor network and how that will play out?
The very first thing we're doing and we're already working on it is a referral program. Essentially, if I'm a lot of our customers, they started in their 20's. Now they're in their 30's. They had an asset pool that was this big, very comfortable managing it on their own. Now it's grown to this big. Suddenly they have kids and a house, and life gets in the way of managing this. The portfolio becomes a certain size and they're not comfortable. They've expressed interest in sticking with us and bringing all their assets to us. We didn't have a solution for them. Now we have that solution. I think you should expect us to be very aggressive in the way that we attack this.
The referral programs that used to exist for advisors, I think there used to be 2,500 referral RIAs that were getting referrals from either TD Ameritrade, Schwab, Fidelity. I'll just pick those three. TD Ameritrade got gobbled up by Schwab. I think the number of RIAs currently getting referrals is about 250. We will open that back up again. You can anticipate that there will be a lot of RIAs coming.
Yeah. You've seen success in accumulating assets. I want to dive into some of the specific derivative products that you rolled out recently, most notably futures, also event contracts, index options were last year too. Of these big new products that you've rolled out, where are you seeing the most traction? I think futures, you've said you expect to be the biggest for you over the longer run. Any insight into what you've seen since launch and how it's maybe stacked up to your expectations since you launched?
I can give context. I remember when I was at TD Ameritrade, we rolled out futures. It took us, well, we hit the number of contracts mark at Robinhood in three months. It took five years to do it at TD Ameritrade. Again, let me be fair. We launched in a very good environment. I mean, when you have the VIX sitting at 60, futures are a pretty interesting product, especially when you can trade them around the clock in short and all the other things. I think it's kind of situational. You have to deliver on all these things, especially for your most engaged customers. They want all these asset classes. Index options have been a really quickly growing class. People embrace those.
It's kind of more of the collection of all of them and how they fit together that I think is what's driving a lot of our activity and interest.
Are you seeing, are people coming from other platforms to trade these given the price point? What have you seen in terms of your client base adopting these products? Is it cannibalizing the options side?
We're an extremely data-driven company. We look at the incrementality. We also look at cannibalization. Every single product we launch, we look at that and say, hey, I launched index options. Is that eating into the SPDR ETF or whatever? It's all incrementally adding to that. Like your best client, and people in brokerage in this room understand this, your best client is one that uses all of your technology and all your asset classes. They essentially build on each other. I think in general, as we continue to iterate there, the strength of each one of those kind of adds to the whole collective pie. That's what's, I think, been pretty powerful. We're still net ACAT positive. I brought this up last year. I think I got a response against every single broker in America, including the one you were just talking to.
Let's talk about event contracts. That's one that where earlier this year you tried to launch Super Bowl Contracts. The CFTC kind of pushed back on you. Since then you've launched March Madness, NBA, NHL playoffs. What have you seen on the event contract front? What's made you comfortable in kind of expanding that offering? Where do you see that going from here?
I'm in very strong agreement with Thomas Petterfy that this is going to be very big. And when I say that, I mean the event contracts as a whole. Sports is a component of it. But the event contracts as a whole, whether it's economic indicators, derivatives of earnings on Apple, or any, like you think about the amount of areas where people have expressed a desire to express a financial interest or mitigate or hedge. Look, even the election contract, like we launched that. And within 1 week, we had 800,000 accounts and $500,000,000 contracts in one week. And by the way, we built it in 3. So you can understand how quickly we can move on these things. But I think what made it so fascinating is it's not just something where you can trade and maybe hedge a portfolio, but it's a source of information.
I told you the number of people that were trading and the number of accounts and everything. We had far more people looking at it. On that evening of the election, two hours before the major networks were saying, hey, you know the swing states went this way, contracts had already moved. Crypto was here. Tesla was here. Our customers got to see all that. It's an amazing source of information for them. Now think about it across a whole bunch of other things, economic indicators, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's just such a powerful source of information. Again, I keep using this example. Like one of the really frustrating things for customers is they're Apple fans. They come out with their, they do all their homework.
They say, you know, have the number of units, revenue, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Everything's nailed. Then earnings comes out. Boom, the stock craps because of guidance or something like that. That's very frustrating. To be able to say, hey, there's a prediction market on the variables that they chose to sort of protect that portfolio or capitalize on what they did from a research standpoint is really kind of cool. Like, it's really, like I would love to say it's new, but it's really not. It's kind of like why weather futures came out of the crop instead of grains. They basically looked at it and said, what are we really hedging here? We're hedging the weather, right? Why don't we just get right to that and not do something that's abstracted from it?
Yeah. I was at the Bitcoin conference last week. The Kalshi CEO spoke. I thought it was interesting.
Sorry. Yeah.
I thought it was interesting. He was talking about how much traction they'd seen in weather. They hadn't really seen a lot of traction in economic contracts. Maybe that's just a factor of there's plenty of vehicles out there to take a view and hedge that risk away. Sticking with the topic of Kalshi, you're partnered with them for a lot of your contracts right now. I know Vlad said in the past that you have plans to build out your own event contract platform. Is that still in the cards? I think it basically doubles your economics if you were going to do that yourself.
Yeah. I mean, you should consider us like, you know, we've also used Forecast X. So you should consider us looking at everything, including our own. The one thing that we really like about it is like the way we're approached, let's take sports, for example. We're super aligned with our customers. And what I mean by that is you are trading with you, right? I'm not incented by you losing, which is not what happens in other models. Like I want you to lose, so I win. We kind of like that model because we want to be aligned with our customers. To the extent we can maintain that model and still have an avenue to do more of it on our own, we'll explore that.
Have your conversations with regulators improved from earlier this year?
We're very transparent with the regulators. We tell them what we're going to do in advance of what we're going to do. When they tell us we shouldn't be doing something, then we stand down and we don't do it. It's not dissimilar to crypto. Like we were the good child in crypto. You know we didn't have hundreds of coins. We didn't do staking, lending, etc. , when it was considered a security. And so you know if things change, then we'll capitalize on that.
That's a good segwey into crypto. Very topical right now. Over the last year, you've seen a big uptick in volumes. You closed the Bitstamp acquisition earlier this week. You announced WonderFi a little bit ago. What's the strategy around crypto? What more do you think you can be doing? What do these acquisitions mean for the story going forward?
Yeah. I'm going to talk about it, but understand that Johan is the man. He's the person who runs our crypto entity. I'm involved. I'm involved, but I'm not involved at the level he is. I think what makes Bitstamp really cool is a couple of things. Number one, we've been doing all our, it's not dissimilar to brokerage. We've been doing all our competing on the retail side. We haven't been in the institutional space, which our competitors are in. Now we're in the institutional space. Second thing is they have existing customers, $500,000, and then 5,000 institutional customers. They also have a ton of capabilities that we don't have. Those capabilities exist largely in Europe now. As things change, you should expect us to bring those capabilities here. Finally, they have 50 licenses.
Getting licenses abroad is not an easy proposition. We're exploring quite a bit and moving around internationally. We shouldn't minimize how time-consuming and costly that can be.
Yeah. How do you think about, I know you have aspirations to expand internationally. What does an acquisition like Bitstamp give you in terms of establishing brand recognition in markets upon which you could build out other asset classes in the future?
No, it's a good point. I left it out. I'm glad you brought it up because they do have, I mean, they're the oldest exchange. They have recognition. They already have established relationships, which is very helpful. Whenever we go somewhere, we always look at, we look at acquisition. We look at organic. We look at what we do in a lot of places we go to. If you think about the Robinhood story, you bring 26 million customers in in a very short period of time that are young and diverse. Today we sit at 60% of US households that are participating in the market. Imagine us coming into your country or region and sitting down with the elected officials and regulators. They're sitting at 15% of their households in the market. They're very welcoming.
They're like, please do what you did in the U.S. here so that they're not relying on the government when they get to a retirement age or whatever it is. It is actually really exciting to be able to have those conversations and entertain ideas about where we're going next.
You've launched in the U.K. I've seen you've expanded that product offering nicely here in the last couple of months. Singapore is another one you've announced. Where else do you have aspirations, if you care to share?
We got Europe now with Bitstamp and Canada with WonderFi. I do not know if we can say, but I would say I have a lot of frequent flyer miles.
Yeah.
We're looking around in a lot of places. We want to do it in a manner, like we're not going to jump all over the place and get ahead of ourselves. We have to do it. We want to get traction in the places we go, make sure we establish ourselves as somebody who's going to be there for a long period of time. We'll be methodical about it.
Yeah. All right. With the time we have left, I want to talk about some, I think, hot topics that we'll speak with others about at the conference. One's tokenization. One's 24/7 trading. They kind of go together.
I'm glad you went to 24/7 trading because there may have been some misinformation on 24/7 trading. I can tell you with pretty much certainty who was first there.
Yeah.
You can ask the regulators who talk to them.
One of the things that our previous guest said was, I thought interesting, he thought 24/7 or after-hours trading was going to go from, I think he said 2% today to 20% in the next 25 years or something to that effect.
I don't think it's going to take that long.
Yeah.
No. I do not think it's going to take that long when we see the volumes that we're doing. May was the biggest month we've ever had, the month of April during the tariff. All the news is happening when the market's closed. I mean, if I want to wait till the next morning to react, I'm behind the eight ball. We already have asset classes that trade around the clock. The idea, again, I probably said this too long, but I think we'll look back in a couple of years and laugh at the notion that we waited till 9:30 A.M. Eastern for trading to start. I thought like when we first did it, we thought there would be benefits. I'm dating myself. Remember, we used to have problems with the plumbing when there'd be so many orders bunched up for the open.
You alleviate so many things. Not only do you give customers the ability to basically buy stock XYZ whenever they want to buy it, tell a 30-year-old that they do the research and homework in the evening, tell them that they cannot put that order in. They are like, what? What are you talking about? Like Amazon does not close. I lived through COVID. I did not see a bunch of people standing on a trading floor. I know this is possible, right? I just think that will come quicker.
There's one other thing I want to talk about. In the fall, you're planning to launch Robinhood Banking. So you'll have checking and savings accounts. Right now, I think on the App Store or from data that you shared, you're the number one venue for new investors that are looking to open an investment account. What do you think the chances are that you see younger people choosing Robinhood for their first bank accounts as well? And do you have any predictions around how much of your customers today you think could adopt Robinhood as their primary banking relationship?
We have over 3 million people on the wait list for a credit card. We are being very careful about how we roll it out. I would say the goal is really to have Robinhood be a one-stop destination. Like nobody wants multiple apps for the things they do. If they can do it all in one place and it is a pleasant experience, then that is what they want. That is where we are aiming for. We will have the whole family included. You can do that with our credit cards today. You know, have child card one-time usage as well. I think there is a lot of avenues there to be able to have this all be something that you can do collectively, including crypto, of course.
All right. Last one, big picture question. If we look ahead five years, what do you think the biggest storylines will be in the trading space, in the retail trading space? What do you kind of think is going to be the topic du jour?
I think there's so many exciting things happening in brokers. As Thomas said, technology is leading a lot of them. The tokenization and what that's going to mean, like every customer has a strong desire to participate in these early-stage startups that are having all their appreciation before they hit the public market, if they ever hit the public market. Tokenization opens that door. Tokenization opens the door to real estate, all the other asset classes that basically are not really accessible by today's standards. I think technology is going to be amazing. I also think AI is going to be cool. We have some really cool stuff coming out from an AI standpoint. Something as simple as, hey, why is my stock moving like crazy? You have to go to five different sources. There's five different reasons. We're solving that for customers through AI.
It'll be delivered to their lap really quickly.
That's Cortex.
That's Cortex.
That you introduced in March, right?
Yep. You'll see more of that coming soon, very soon. I think the final thing would be just having a global marketplace and making this a global marketplace. I think a lot of the technologies that are now coming out just kind of erase borders, which makes it really cool for people to be able to invest in any place they want, in any asset class, which is, I think it's going to be amazing.
All right. I think that's all the time we had. I wish we had more, but thank you so much for coming to see us.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.