Robinhood CEO outlines opportunities in options trades, redesign

In This Article:

At its first annual HOOD Summit in Miami this week, Robinhood Markets (HOOD) unveiled new futures and index options trades for active investors. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev sits down with Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi to speak more about this new suite of trading tools.

Robinhood also underwent a redesign with a new logo and a refreshed desktop platform for active traders, titled Robinhood Legend.

"The majority of our customers right now and consequently our trading activity is on mobile, where we've been a leader. But if you look at the broader market, about half of trading happens on desktop and web because the additional screen real estate allows traders to do different things," Tenev explains the visual overhaul. "Like if they wanted to trade from the chart, or at least trade with the market data and the tools available on one interface. It's just more difficult to do that on mobile."

This is all part of Robinhood's strategy to gain market share among trading platforms. The new options products is positioning Robinhood to get ahead "of the big wealth transfer that's coming in in the next few decades."

"A lot of trillions [of dollars] of assets and wealth are shifting from Silent Generation and Baby Boomers down to younger generations. Robinhood has such a position in the US, with the younger generations," Tenev outlines, contrasting Robinhood's attention to investors with the "forced migrations" of customers larger banks and investment platforms implement.

"We've been seeing a lot of complaints around the TD Ameritrade to Schwab migration in particular. Also E-Trade to Morgan Stanley. And the platforms are being put on the back burner," Tenev explains. "There's less of an incentive for these large wirehouses to invest in active trading platforms because so much more of the revenue and the focus is coming from wealth management services."

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief here.

This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.