Robinhood Markets (HOOD) — Company Research

Last Updated: 25 May 2026

Robinhood Markets, Inc. (NASDAQ: HOOD) is the mobile-first brokerage that popularised commission-free trading and is now reshaping itself into what management calls a "financial super app". After years of losses, the business has scaled into sustained profitability: full-year 2025 net revenues rose 52% to a record $4,473 million and net income reached $1,883 million, with momentum carrying into a record first quarter of 2026. The company ended Q1 2026 with 27.4 million funded customers, $307 billion in total platform assets and 4.3 million Robinhood Gold subscribers. This report examines Robinhood's revenue engine, five-year financials, valuation, growth strategy, competitive set and the regulatory and cyclical risks that come with a transaction-heavy model, using only figures from the company's filings and official data.

1. Company Snapshot

Robinhood is a US-listed financial-services company founded in 2013 by Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It went public on the Nasdaq in July 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in 2025. The company reports in US dollars under US GAAP.

Field	Value
Ticker / Exchange	HOOD / NASDAQ
Sector	Finance & Banking — retail brokerage & financial services
Headquarters	Menlo Park, California, USA
Founded / Listed	2013 / IPO July 2021
CEO / Leadership	Vlad Tenev (Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO / Chief Executive Officer); Shiv Verma (CFO)
Employees	~2,900 (end of 2025)
Market capitalisation	~$66 billion, 24 May 2026
FY2025 net revenues	$4,473 million
FY2025 net income	$1,883 million
Funded Customers (Q1 2026)	27.4 million
Total Platform Assets (Q1 2026)	$307 billion
52-week range	$62.92 – $153.86

2. Bull vs Bear

Bull Case

• Profitability has scaled fast: net income rose from a $541m loss in 2023 to $1,411m in 2024 and $1,883m in 2025, with 2025 net margin of 42% — the model now converts revenue growth into earnings.
• Relentless product velocity: Gold Card, Banking, advisory (Strategies), retirement, futures, index options, prediction markets and tokenisation (Robinhood Chain) are widening the platform from a trading app into a full financial ecosystem.
• The Gold flywheel: Robinhood Gold subscribers reached a record 4.3 million in Q1 2026 (up 36% Y/Y), adding high-margin recurring revenue and deepening customer engagement and asset gathering.
• Asset gathering is accelerating: record net deposits of $68 billion in 2025 drove total platform assets to $307 billion, a 39% Y/Y increase, expanding the base on which Robinhood earns net interest and transaction revenue.
• Structural tailwind: management frames the multi-decade "Great Wealth Transfer" as a generational opportunity, with Robinhood positioned at the centre of younger customers' financial lives.

Bear Case

• Transaction revenue is cyclical: a large share of revenue depends on trading activity and retail risk appetite, which can fall sharply in a downturn — crypto revenue already dropped 47% Y/Y in Q1 2026.
• Regulatory overhang on PFOF: payment for order flow remains a core revenue source and a recurring target of regulatory scrutiny; restrictions or a ban would hit economics directly.
• Interest-rate sensitivity: net interest revenue is roughly a third of the total, so falling short-term rates would compress a major profit stream.
• Expensive valuation: the shares trade around 36x trailing earnings and ~14x sales, leaving little margin for a slowdown in trading volumes or asset growth.
• Newer products carry legal and execution risk: prediction-market event contracts, crypto and tokenised assets face evolving and uncertain regulation that could curtail offerings.
• Founder-controlled governance: a dual-class structure concentrates voting power with the founders, limiting outside shareholders' influence.

3. Business Segments

Robinhood reports as a single operating segment but breaks revenue into three streams. Transaction-based revenue (largely market-maker rebates on options, equities, crypto and event contracts) and net interest revenue (margin lending, securities lending, interest on cash and the credit card) are the two large engines, with subscription and other revenue a fast-growing third.

Segment	% of Q1 2026 revenue	What it is
Transaction-based	~58% ($623m)	Rebates and fees from routing customer trades in options ($260m), equities ($82m), crypto ($134m) and event contracts/other ($147m).
Net interest	~34% ($359m)	Interest from margin loans, securities lending, segregated cash and the Gold Card receivables, net of interest paid to customers.
Other (incl. Gold)	~8% ($85m)	Robinhood Gold subscription fees ($50m) plus proxy, data and other service revenue.

4. Business Model & Moat

How it makes money. Robinhood monetises customer activity and balances three ways. It earns transaction-based revenue when customers trade (paid mostly by market makers via payment for order flow), net interest revenue on the cash, margin loans and securities it intermediates, and subscription revenue from Robinhood Gold. Average revenue per user reached $157 in Q1 2026, up 8% year-on-year, as customers adopted more products.

The moat. Robinhood's advantages are brand, design and scale. It defined commission-free, mobile-first investing for a younger generation and now serves 27.4 million funded customers with $307 billion of assets. That scale lowers unit costs and funds rapid product development, while the Gold subscription and retirement accounts raise switching costs and lengthen customer lifetimes.

Why it's defensible. The expanding product suite — brokerage, crypto, banking, credit card, advisory, retirement, futures and prediction markets — turns a trading app into a customer's primary financial relationship, so that the more products a customer adopts, the harder it is to leave. Being designated broker and sole initial trustee for the US Treasury's "Trump Accounts" programme illustrates how scale and brand open doors to distribution that smaller rivals cannot reach.

The constraint. Much of the revenue base is sensitive to market cycles, interest rates and regulation. Robinhood does not control the rules governing payment for order flow, crypto or event contracts, and a single adverse regulatory decision can reprice the business.

5. Financial Health

Robinhood's five-year record shows a dramatic swing from heavy, IPO-era losses to scaled profitability. Revenue more than doubled from 2023 to 2025 while the company crossed into sustained GAAP profit.

Year	Revenue ($m)	YoY %	GAAP EPS (diluted, $)	Adjusted EPS	Dividend/share	Long-term debt (YE)
2021	1,815	+89.2%	(7.49)	n/a	$0.00	Nil
2022	1,358	−25.2%	(1.17)	n/a	$0.00	Nil
2023	1,865	+37.3%	(0.61)	n/a	$0.00	Nil
2024	2,951	+58.2%	1.56	n/a	$0.00	Nil
2025	4,473	+51.6%	2.05	n/a	$0.00	Nil

Robinhood does not publish an "adjusted EPS" measure (it reports Adjusted EBITDA instead), so that column is marked n/a, and the company has never paid a dividend. Long-term debt is shown as Nil because Robinhood carries no corporate term borrowings; it funds the Gold Card through a separate, securitised Credit Card Funding Trust and maintains an undrawn revolving credit facility, and ended 2025 with roughly $4.3 billion of corporate cash.

Quarter	Revenue ($m)	Adjusted EPS	GAAP EPS (diluted, $)
Q1 2026	1,067	n/a	0.38
Q4 2025	1,283	n/a	0.66
Q3 2025	1,274	n/a	0.61
Q2 2025	989	n/a	0.42
Q1 2025	927	n/a	0.37
FY2025 total	4,473	n/a	2.05

The four quarters of 2025 sum to the full-year revenue of $4,473m. Quarterly GAAP EPS may differ slightly from the full-year figure due to share-count rounding and the timing of tax items.

6. Valuation

Raw metrics, May 2026. Not opinions on whether the stock is cheap or expensive.

Metric	Value
Market cap	~$66bn (24 May 2026; ~$74 share price × ~901m Class A + Class B shares)
Trailing P/E (GAAP)	~36x (market cap ~$66bn / LTM net income ~$1.89bn; LTM = FY2025 $1,883m − Q1'25 $336m + Q1'26 $346m)
P/E (forward)	~39x (based on consensus FY2026 EPS, May 2026)
P/S (TTM)	~14x (market cap ~$66bn / LTM net revenues ~$4.61bn; LTM = FY2025 $4,473m − Q1'25 $927m + Q1'26 $1,067m)
P/FCF	~42x on a literal basis (FY2025 operating cash flow $1,638m − capex $54m ≈ $1.58bn). Note: for a broker, operating cash flow is dominated by customer-cash and working-capital movements, so reported FCF is volatile and not a clean equity-value metric.
EV/EBITDA (TTM)	~27x on GAAP EBITDA ~$2.27bn (LTM = FY2025 $2,226m − Q1'25 $397m + Q1'26 $442m); ~24x on adjusted EBITDA ~$2.59bn
Enterprise value	~$62bn (market cap ~$66bn + corporate term debt ~$0 − corporate cash & equivalents ~$5.0bn per Q1 2026 balance sheet)
52-week high	$153.86
52-week low	$62.92
Short interest (% of float)	~4% (≈31.8m shares; ~3.5% of shares outstanding, late May 2026)
Days to cover	~1.0

7. Growth Drivers

Robinhood's growth strategy is to deepen wallet share through relentless product expansion. In recent quarters it has launched or scaled Robinhood Banking (over $2 billion of deposits crossed in Q1 2026), the Gold Card and new Platinum Card, the Strategies advisory product, retirement accounts (retirement assets under custody up 90% Y/Y to a record $27.4 billion), futures, index options and prediction-market event contracts (a record 8.8 billion contracts traded in Q1 2026).

A second leg is new asset classes and markets. Robinhood is building Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer-2 for tokenised real-world assets, expanding internationally (including in-principle approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bitstamp acquisition), and has launched Robinhood Ventures Fund I to give retail investors access to private markets. The April 2026 designation as broker and sole initial trustee for the US Treasury's "Trump Accounts" programme adds a potentially large new customer funnel.

Underpinning it all is asset gathering: record net deposits of $68 billion in 2025 and an annualised ~22% deposit growth rate in Q1 2026 expand the balances on which Robinhood earns interest and trading revenue, while the multi-decade "Great Wealth Transfer" provides a structural backdrop. You can follow HOOD's price action and build watchlists on the ChartsView Live Charts page.

8. Peer Comparison

Robinhood competes across several fronts: traditional discount brokers, automated global brokers and crypto-native platforms. It is smaller than the incumbents by client assets but has been growing customers and revenue faster.

Peer	Market cap (May 2026)	Key 2025 metric
Charles Schwab (SCHW)	~$157 billion	~$11.9 trillion total client assets (FY2025)
Interactive Brokers (IBKR)	~$121 billion	4.4m client accounts; ~$780bn client equity (FY2025)
Coinbase (COIN)	~$49 billion	~$7.2bn total revenue (FY2025); largest US crypto exchange
Robinhood (HOOD)	~$66 billion	27.4m funded customers; $307bn platform assets (Q1 2026)

Peer market caps are approximate publicly quoted values in May 2026; operating metrics are the latest disclosed by each company. Robinhood sits between the trillion-dollar-asset incumbents and the pure-play crypto exchanges, with a younger, more active customer base and a broader product roadmap than most.

9. Insider Activity

As a US domestic filer, Robinhood's officers and directors report transactions on Form 4. The most recent notable open-market sale by a named executive is shown below.

Name	Date	Type	Shares	Price	Value	Plan Type
Vlad Tenev (Chairman & CEO)	06 Apr 2026	Sale	375,000	$69.53–$70.12	~$26.19m	Rule 10b5-1 (adopted 5 Sep 2025)

Founders and executives at Robinhood have sold shares periodically under pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, which schedule sales in advance and are common for senior insiders; such sales are not necessarily signals about the business. Investors should consult Robinhood's SEC Form 4 filings for the complete, current record.

10. Key Risks

Robinhood's risks are a mix of regulatory, cyclical and structural:

• Payment-for-order-flow regulation: PFOF is central to transaction revenue and a perennial regulatory target; restrictions or a ban would directly damage economics.
• Cyclicality of trading revenue: revenue is tied to retail trading activity and risk appetite, which can fall sharply in market downturns; crypto revenue fell 47% Y/Y in Q1 2026.
• Interest-rate sensitivity: net interest revenue is roughly a third of the total, so a falling-rate environment would compress a key profit stream.
• Emerging-product legal risk: prediction-market event contracts, crypto, staking and tokenised assets face evolving and uncertain regulation that could curtail or ban offerings.
• Competition: deep-pocketed incumbents (Schwab, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley/E*Trade), automated brokers (Interactive Brokers) and crypto platforms (Coinbase) are all expanding into Robinhood's territory.
• Valuation and sentiment risk: a high earnings and sales multiple leaves the shares exposed to any slowdown in volumes, deposits or product adoption.
• Governance: a dual-class share structure concentrates control with the founders.

11. Recent Developments

• 28 Apr 2026 — Q1 2026 results. Net revenues of $1,067m (+15% Y/Y), net income of $346m, diluted EPS of $0.38, total platform assets of $307bn (+39%) and a record 4.3m Gold subscribers; Adjusted EBITDA of $534m.
• 28 Apr 2026 — Strategic milestones disclosed. Robinhood was named broker and sole initial trustee for the US Treasury's "Trump Accounts" programme (working with BNY); launched the IPO of Robinhood Ventures Fund I for private-market access; opened the public testnet for Robinhood Chain; crossed $2bn in Banking deposits; and secured in-principle approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
• 06 Apr 2026 — CEO share sale. Chairman and CEO Vlad Tenev sold 375,000 shares for roughly $26.2m under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 plan.
• 10 Feb 2026 — Q4 and full-year 2025 results. Record full-year revenue of $4.5bn and net income of $1.9bn, with record net deposits of $68bn for the year.

12. Key Dates

• 05 Aug 2026 — expected Q2 2026 results.
• 28 Apr 2026 — Q1 2026 results released (most recent reported quarter).
• 10 Feb 2026 — Q4 and full-year 2025 results released.

Robinhood typically reports quarterly in early February, late April/early May, late July/early August and early November; exact dates are confirmed by the company ahead of time. Track the ChartsView Economic Calendar for rate decisions and macro events that move financial stocks, and compare notes with other investors in the Forum.

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Disclaimer: This research is produced by ChartsView for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All information is sourced from publicly available company filings, press releases, and official data. ChartsView does not use analyst opinions or third-party ratings. Always conduct your own due diligence and consider your personal financial situation before making investment decisions. Past performance is not indicat