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Robinhood chief executive officer Vlad Tenev has a lot to celebrate this holiday time of year . After a jolty few class following Robinhood ’s 2021 initial offering — a period during which shares of the commission - barren trading app plummet bymore than 90%after it suddenly restricted trading in some meme fund — the 12 - year - old company was just declaredYahoo Finance ’s “ rejoinder gillyflower ” of the yr .
need about that award in late mean solar day over Zoom , Tenev was beaming . “ When we were a youthful caller and just got pop , everyone was kind of rooting for us , ” aver Tenev , who superintend approximately 2,500 employees at Robinhood . “ Then at one stop we start up being treated as an officeholder … the vibe became minus , [ and ] during COVID , it just became strange . [ We ] were grow like disturbed , but people were unhappy , and we murder our low , and now it has been very irrefutable . ”
It ’s what ’s around the street corner that has Tenev truly excited , however . Like a spate of fintech entrepreneur , he ’s feel very enthusiastic about a 2nd Trump administration , give that deregulation is likely a priority , along with a far warmer embrace of cryptocurrency .
Unsurprisingly , he plans to take reward of the tight - change landscape painting . Indeed , during our schmoose , we talked about “ burst ” task offers and aboutcrypto . We discussedcopytrading , a trading strategy that allows clients to mechanically duplicate the trades of another trader . We also talk about prediction grocery , where Robinhood plans to increasingly vie with still - individual startup likeKalshiandPolymarketthat are forthrightly focussed on allowing people to reckon on the outcome of succeeding events .
you’re able to listen to the whole thinghere ; meanwhile , below , you’re able to find oneself excerpt specifically pertaining to prevision market place that have been edited lightly for length .
I ’m seeing thatone in 10 Americans[with brokerage account ] have a Robinhood account , yet you only have a quartern percent of the entire retail assets in the United States . Can that be right ?
I have n’t get wind that stat . I have in mind , it does n’t go brainsick to me . There ’s trillions [ of dollars ] of asset [ in the man ] . Robinhood ’s [ AUM ] is decent around $ 200 billion , so we ’ve still got a longsighted way to go . We ’re bigger than when we get going , but some of these guys , like the Schwabs and the Fidelitys , have $ 10 trillion in plus . So we ’re still growing , but our assets are rise 40%-plus twelvemonth over year , rather than 2 % to 3 % .
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When we lastsat down in person , this was a much smaller company with aspiration to become a fiscal services giant ; you ’ve since gotten intowealth managementandcredit cards . I ’m enquire about some unexampled financial mechanisms , like prediction markets ; how big an opportunity is there , do you think ?
I ’ve been a bountiful fan of prediction markets for a foresighted fourth dimension , and it became clean-cut to me comparatively too soon on that political contract are the ideal merchandise in that space , because [ political relation ] is very newsworthy and highly correlate to mart public presentation , so utile as a hedging .
The one other thing was : Everyone check the opinion poll and former results on election night to count on out what ’s go on , and if you ’re watching the newsworthiness , the flick they paint is very unclear , right ? They ’re doing all this math for you and tabulating [ voting ] , but they ’re not really telling you what the betting odds are of one candidate or the other winning the election . You counterpoint that with the prediction grocery store … and I opine what ’s even more muscular is just distill where things remain firm decently now based on all the information that ’s out there . And that ’s a very utilitarian use slip , not necessarily for prediction itself , but really for the newsworthiness .
We did n’t think it ’d be possible to launch [ our own presidential election market ] for this election because there was the cause with the [ Commodity Futures Trading Commission , or CFTC ] , then Kalshiprevailedin the eleventh hour [ to offer contracts that pay off as wager on U.S. political elections ] , and the teammobilized . We put a flock of smashing multitude on it , and we go from intending to launch to actually ship in about two and a one-half workweek …
Did you ever talk to Kalshi about potentially buying it ?
I ’ve talked to Kalshi , not about buy it . We cease up process withForecastEx[a CFTC - registered designated contract bridge market place ( DCM ) for forecast contracts ] . And , this is a picayune bit technological , but we ’re an FCM , a futures charge merchandiser , which is kind of like the client - facing part of a future or swaps dealer , and so we call for to swear on an exchange functionally to do as the back end of all these swop . And we ended up using ForecastEx because they had all the licensure to be able to do that . My reason is that Kalshi is only able-bodied to offer it to retail now , not capable to serve other FCMs .
I read that you ’ve indicated a move into sports could take the form of case contract , too .
I think that was taken a little bit out of context . Certainly , our direction is on federally regulated event declaration rather than traditional sport betting . Right now , event declaration do not permit sports outcomes [ but ] that might change .
You know , there ’s going to be a new CFTC Commissioner [ and ] a lot of people are interested in sports enter the federally regulated kingdom . I believe those product would look very different from traditional mutation betting . But yeah , our focus is on event contracts . I think that ’s going to be a big thing . The presidential election marketplace proved to us that there ’s a slew of requirement for these type of products . We had over half a billion contracts traded in about a week [ by more than ] half a million people . And so I think that the turn one thing we were hear afterward was : Can we have more contracts ? Can this be a more - flesh - out product and not just for the election ?
Obviously sports would be huge and perennial . What other types of contracts are you envisage ?
There ’s a lot of possibleness . A natural burst for Robinhood is economic ones . you may see some examples of a Fed tramp , a Fed drop … anything that ’s at the Cartesian product of tidings and financial grocery is interesting to us . In my opinion , news has increasingly started to unify with entertainment .
There are two ways to take care at [ case contract bridge ] . One is as an alive dealer plus , that combat-ready traders care to trade in alongside choice and future and other things . But the other is as a passive experience , where , if you just want the newsworthiness , event contracts can be a way to deliver that to you in real fourth dimension . We ’re also believe about this , and I think that opens up a liberal curing of possibilities . you’re able to have event contract on jolly much anything from the Oscars and entertainment events to sports to politics . And the categories of effect contracts almost become like the sections of a paper , right ? Art , style , leisure , summercater , business , [ the ] front page , which is material time . So you could suppose the digital combining weight of a newspaper being deliver via event contracts .
Again , for much more with Tenev , you’re able to tune inhere .
