Robinhood to offer futures, index options trading

The company said late Wednesday it will be launching futures and index options trading on its app

Robinhood’s evolution from meme stock trading champion to a wealth management platform continues.

The company said late Wednesday it will be launching futures and index options trading on its app, a move widely telegraphed for months. Both features will debut on Robinhood’s app “soon,” according to the company.

Robinhood also took the wraps off of Robinhood Legend, billed as a sleeker trading platform that targets more sophisticated investors. Robinhood Legend will allow up to eight charts open in a single window, and it could elevate various technical indicators for traders such as Bollinger Bands.

These new trading tools are powerful, Robinhood chairman and Chief Executive Officer Vladimir Tenev told Yahoo Finance. They are well designed, and I think customers are really going to like them, he said.

The redesign and new product drops follow a series of debuts and pivots in recent months.

Robinhood scooped up crypto exchange Bitstamp in June and took aim at credit players American Express and Visa in March with the launch of a credit card that offers 3% cash back on purchases.

In November 2023, it finally debuted its stock trading app in the UK after it launched 24-hour trading on select stocks and exchange traded funds earlier that year.

We do not want to just serve active traders. We want to grow wallet share with our customers; we want to help them build wealth, Tenev told Yahoo Finance in a recent interview.

The firm reported second quarter revenue rose 40% over last year to $682 million. Net earnings improved sharply to $0.21 a share from $0.03 a year ago.

Not everyone on the Street is sold on the company sustaining its profit momentum as rates drop.

We continue to see opportunities across its product pipeline in derivatives, Gold, and crypto, but some of these offerings are early in development and/or adoption with their inherent earnings power unproven across rate environments, cautioned JPMorgan analyst Ken Worthington in a client note.