Robinhood, the trading app that helped popularize commission-free investing for retail traders, unveiled a sweeping set of new features at its HOOD Summit in Houston, Texas, aimed squarely at winning over more active, high-frequency traders. The brokerage introduced AI-powered trading agents capable of executing trades on a user’s behalf, crypto perpetual futures carrying up to 10x leverage, and weekend trading access for select U.S. stocks.
Robinhood Presents: Engines of Creation https://t.co/22qpyqJWx0
— Robinhood (@RobinhoodApp) September 29, 2026
Alongside these headline additions, Robinhood is also extending its options trading windows, expanding intraday margin availability, and rolling out new contracts letting users bet directly on corporate earnings metrics. The underlying wager is straightforward: give traders more markets, longer hours, and more ways to take on risk, all without pushing them toward a competing platform.
Filling The Weekend Gap Left By 24-hour Trading
Vice president of product management Abhishek Fatehpuria framed the company’s ambitions bluntly, saying being the top choice for active traders ranks among Robinhood’s leading corporate priorities, and that the company isn’t favoring any single asset class over another.
24/5 was just the start.
24/7 trading is coming soon 👀
— Robinhood (@RobinhoodApp) September 29, 2026
That competitive pressure has been intensifying industry-wide, with legacy brokerages like Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers, and Fidelity all broadening their own trading offerings to satisfy a generation of investors accustomed to markets that essentially never close, a habit largely shaped by crypto’s always-on trading culture.
Crypto markets, after all, run continuously every single day of the year, a reality that’s increasingly pressured the traditional stock market’s conventional weekday-only structure, even as brokerages and alternative trading platforms have already stretched equity trading well past the standard 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. window.
Both the NYSE and Nasdaq have separately filed to extend their own trading hours, while Robinhood itself launched a 24 Hour Market back in 2023, though that service still paused entirely on weekends. This latest move closes that remaining gap, letting users trade a selection of stocks and ETFs on Saturdays and Sundays through Bruce ATS, an alternative trading system. As Fatehpuria summarized it, the company’s playbook comes down to adding more assets, then extending the hours those assets can be traded.
AI Agents Take On Research & Trade Execution
Arguably the more significant departure from how traditional brokerages typically operate comes through Robinhood Agents, a concept the company first previewed earlier this year. Under this system, customers can spin up an AI agent directly inside the app, choosing between models built by OpenAI or Anthropic, and grant that agent access to its own dedicated trading account. From there, the agent can analyze market conditions, build out watchlists, and place trades across stocks, options, and crypto.
A companion feature called Loops takes this further, letting users hand the agent standing instructions to continuously monitor markets and automatically execute a predefined strategy once specific conditions are triggered, removing the need to issue a fresh prompt every time.
Introducing Robinhood Agents. 🔥
With Agents, anyone can now build their own agent directly inside Robinhood and get started with agentic trading. You can:
– Create an agent in just a few taps, no technical setup required
– Analyze, strategize, and execute through your agent
-…— Robinhood (@RobinhoodApp) September 29, 2026
Robinhood says demand for a more technical version of this concept has already proven substantial, with more than 150,000 agentic accounts created since it opened its trading infrastructure to external AI agents earlier in the year, generating millions of daily tool calls in the process. This newer, embedded version strips away most of the technical setup that previously came with that process.
Naturally, giving an AI system trade execution power raises an obvious concern: what happens when it gets a call wrong? Senior director of product management Gina Pasqua-Abeles addressed that directly, describing the agent as more of an extension or research-focused trading tool that happens to be capable of executing trades, while emphasizing that users are still expected to maintain some level of oversight over their agent’s activity.
By default, Robinhood will require customer approval before an agent can execute any proposed trade, though users retain the option to disable that safeguard. At launch, agents won’t be permitted to borrow on margin and can only draw from funds specifically placed within their dedicated account.
Robinhood is also offering paid access to external data sources agents can factor into their decision-making, including options data from Unusual Whales, market data sourced from Nasdaq, crypto-specific data from Token Terminal, and government activity tracking from Quiver Quantitative.
Perpetual Futures Bring Crypto-style Leverage To U.S. Retail Traders
Robinhood’s push into crypto-inspired trading mechanics extends further still with the introduction of perpetual futures contracts. Perps have become one of the defining products in crypto trading precisely because they let traders take leveraged long or short positions without any of the expiration constraints found in conventional futures contracts.
Perps are now rolling out for US traders 🛸
Perpetual futures never expire, trade around the clock, and let you customize leverage up to 10:1.
With them, Robinhood is now the first major brokerage to offer all six asset classes on one platform: stocks, options, crypto, futures,…
— Robinhood (@RobinhoodApp) September 29, 2026
Historically, these instruments have been closely associated with offshore crypto exchanges, largely because U.S. regulatory limitations have restricted their availability to domestic retail traders. Robinhood now plans to offer eligible U.S. customers access to perpetuals through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp, beginning with crypto assets. Bitcoin and Ether contracts will carry leverage up to 10 times, while other supported tokens will start at a more conservative 3 times leverage.
That leverage inherently makes the product considerably riskier than simply buying crypto outright, since a relatively modest price move against a heavily leveraged position can trigger forced liquidation. Robinhood said it deliberately opted for lower leverage limits on more volatile, longer-tail tokens, while leaving room to adjust those limits going forward. Grace Q, the company’s head of U.S. futures products, acknowledged that plenty of active perps traders specifically want higher leverage, but said Robinhood chose to start more conservatively, particularly for less established coins.
Earnings-linked Contracts Round Out The Expansion
Robinhood is simultaneously expanding into a separate category of derivatives products centered on corporate earnings outcomes. Offered in partnership with Cboe, these binary contracts will let customers place trades directly on whether specific companies hit defined performance metrics, such as quarterly revenue, earnings per share, or, in Apple’s specific case, iPhone unit sales.
Taken together, all of these additions point toward the same broader ambition: building an account where an active retail trader can move fluidly between stocks, crypto, options, prediction-style markets, and leveraged derivatives, increasingly without regard for the traditional market clock.
As Fatehpuria put it, users should be able to sell stocks and buy crypto, or sell crypto and move into prediction markets, all within the same platform. Crypto markets operated this way out of necessity for years, and now, some of that same market structure appears to be migrating back into mainstream retail finance.
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