No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:26:06 · Sarah Guo, Vlad Tenev
[00:26:06] S1: It's not necessarily ownership. What is your perspective on prediction markets? [00:26:11] S0: Yeah, I mean, actually think prediction markets do tie into ownership because a lot of people have unique knowledge and ideas and they have hot takes on things that maybe not everyone knows. Like you might be an expert in AI model development. We have lots of contracts that allow you to speculate and hedge on what AI model will be best this week or this month or this year. And the way to kind of like monetize that knowledge before prediction markets was highly indirect. Like maybe you could trade derivatives on Google stock or Nvidia stock. [00:26:51] S1: And Zaprecise, yeah.
00:26:52 · Vlad Tenev
[00:26:52] S0: Yeah, and so there is an important thing with being able to monetize your own knowledge and doing it more directly. It's actually one of the reasons we announced and we're planning to launch KPI contracts. So for a long time, if you wanted, let's say you're studying a company and you have a pretty good idea that it's gonna beat earnings, EPS or revenue. Well, in the past, if you bought the stock or, yeah, you bought like an option on the stock, sometimes the stock would beat, the company would beat earnings, the stock would go down for some unrelated reason, you know, guidance and one of these things. So KPI contracts now allow you to actually trade the EPS print, the revenue print, or any of the other KPIs that might matter to a company. So I think there's that aspect where you can actually monetize your belief. You can hedge more precisely. For example, there's a will the California billionaire tax pass contract, which I think is a useful hedging instrument for some people. Not me personally, I'm not hedging with it, but one could. The other thing about it is I think it's a new source of information. I think of it almost as in the pure form prediction markets are an evolution of news. So what does news look like in the future? I don't think it's the New York Times, but I think it could be something like it where you have your front page, your business section, lifestyle, culture, sports, and sports is a big part of it, and you just can see what's happening and what's likely to happen in the future through the odds. So a lot of people don't even trade these things. They just like to open the app and just check out
00:28:47 · Sarah Guo, Vlad Tenev
[00:28:47] S1: That's me. [00:28:47] S0: What's gonna happen, yeah. [00:28:49] S1: Do you think people will let agents trade for them, and when, and what's the impact of that? [00:28:53] S0: Yeah. So we launched a product earlier this year, which is basically a Robinhood MCP. We call it Agentic Trading, and we have Agentic Credit Card as well. So in the broader realm of Agentic Finance, I think there's two things that have product market fit. One is Agentic Trading, very clearly, like having an agent execute your trades and do a strategy for you. And we're seeing really strong adoption. Like over 150,000 customers have opened Agentic Trading accounts with us in the few months since we've launched it. [00:29:29] S1: Wow.
00:29:29 · Sarah Guo, Vlad Tenev
[00:29:29] S1: Wow. [00:29:29] S0: And if you look at the tool calls, the tool calls have just been following this smooth exponential where the last number we announced was something like 30,000,000 tool calls per day. So Agentic Trading, clearly a product market fit. And we started by just having an MCP and a couple weeks ago at our hood summit event, we announced Robinhood Agents, which is basically taking it one step further and the harness and the entire UI is now inside a Robinhood account. So you can kind of think of it as if you're a Claude code or a Codex user, it's almost like a tool like that that's optimized for trading. So you can run loops and say, okay, every day execute a run of my strategy, rebalance my portfolio, look at opportunities. We have skills, so you can you know, do like a portfolio rebalance or all sorts of other things. We have agent apps, so we launched an app store where you can, for example, connect to a source of satellite data and if you wanna create a strategy that like counts cars and parking lots of retailers or something of that nature, we'll make that available. And the way that I think that'll evolve is we're gonna look at all the capabilities that the coding harnesses have and see how we can provide really nice, clean, trader native versions of that that just make it really really easy to be an active trader.
00:31:10 · Sarah Guo
[00:31:10] S1: Amazing. What do you think the impact is of this on either you know, participant mix or financial infrastructure? Just because many of these things that you describe, institutional traders have the ability to do this, but it's expensive and sophisticated, right? And so if that's democratized, what does that mean?
00:31:28 · Vlad Tenev
[00:31:28] S0: Well, that's really the north star of the product. It's can we put the capabilities of a hedge fund or a sophisticated algorithmic trading firm into the pockets of normal individuals. So in the same way that if you were a sophisticated grad student in computer science or something, could write a trading strategy, and if you went through even more effort, could deploy it, you could get rack space in the data center connected to the exchanges. Can we just sort of streamline all aspects of that so that in the same way that it's made it easier for anyone to be a software engineer, Robinhood agents and our MCP can make it easier for more people to be quant traders. And I think the outcome of that is there will just be more trading activity. I think at first it'll concentrated in a relatively small group of sophisticated people, but their trading activity will likely increase quite substantially. And then over time it'll just filter to more and more of the population. Yeah, I think coding is a good analogy. It's like there's lots of people that wanna, there's people that code and for them, you know, they were first to adopt the coding agents and their output multiplied. But then now there's people that just wouldn't have picked up, you know, VS Code or Cursor before, but someone showed them how to use Claude or Codex, and now they can build a website just really easily. So it'll lift, I think it'll lift the tide across the board.