On Wednesday, retail trading platform Robinhood announced a new in-app social network called Robinhood Social. The community will have real people posting verified trades in real time and following other investors, including tracking and “copy trading” the moves of public figures. It rides upon a high-growth year for Robinhood, which was up 45% in revenue and 105% in net income in its last earnings quarter (Q2 2025) and will join the S&P 500 later this month. The news highlights Robinhood’s ambitions to expand beyond its core trading business. As CEO Vlad Tenev put it, “Robinhood is no longer just where you trade – it’s your financial superapp.”

Robinhood hopes to combine the charting and research of a Bloomberg terminal with the engagement of a social network – allowing users to develop and share their trading strategies. With Robinhood Social, it is aiming to be a high-quality source of idea generation with a strong signal-to-noise ratio. In large part, this will be based on Robinhood’s ability to verify profile identities through KYC (Know Your Customer) processes, and validate traders’ real performance (e.g. year-to-date return, 1-year and daily P&L, profit rate, past trades). Users will also be able to track public figures (e.g. CEOs, insiders, hedge fund managers, politicians) based on their publicly reported trades.

Like any social network, Robinhood Social will be centered on a continually refreshed feed of posts. A post is required to include one of the author’s trades, and might reference stocks, options, ETFs, futures, crypto, sports contracts or other prediction markets. Users have visibility into when the author entered and exited a position, to help them ascertain underlying motivations. Users will be able to click on a stock-ticker or other symbol in a social post to initiate a trade directly on the platform – feeding Robinhood’s core business. The social platform will launch in beta in Q1 2026 to an initial group of about 10K users, after which it will roll out more broadly.

While Robinhood is perhaps best-known for its equity trading, most of its growth and revenue now comes from higher-velocity categories like options and crypto. Retail trades now represent about 20% of the options market (as a percent of orders) – a figure which has ticked up since 2022. Under the crypto-friendly Trump administration, Robinhood undertook a major push into crypto this year, with moves to offer tokenized shares of US public and private companies (including SpaceX and, controversially, OpenAI) to EU investors. It also launched crypto staking, acquired crypto trading firm WonderFi for CAD$250M, and is working on its own blockchain.

With the median age of Robinhood’s users now reaching 35, the trading platform is also adding more traditional businesses like managed portfolios (Robinhood Strategies) and private banking (Robinhood Banking), with an eye towards becoming a full-service financial services company. 1.5M users have retirement accounts on Robinhood’s platform, with an aggregate $20B+ in assets. 300K+ users have Robinhood’s 3%-back credit card, with another 2M-3M+ on the waiting list.

“Copy trading” – i.e. copying other users’ trades – has picked up steam lately. Robinhood is relatively late to the game, with players like eToro and newer entrants like Dub offering automatic copying of portfolios for years now. Robinhood had previously expressed concern about regulatory issues, such as whether copy trading would be considered investment advice and the potential for conflicts of interest, market manipulation, and liability. Robinhood Social will reportedly require users to replicate trades manually, as opposed to automatic copying.

Retail investors have the reputation of being relatively unsophisticated, with the average retail trader conducting just 6 min of research before initiating a trade. It’s one of the reasons why Robinhood gets a higher price for its order flow from trading firms than more established rivals like Schwab receive. Given that US retail investors are now a very large pool of 160M+ Americans, it’s likely that, with a bit of knowledge, many are falling into the Dunning-Kruger trap and overestimating their competence. It would perhaps also help explain the popularity of “finfluencers” and the FinTwit crowd, who could gravitate towards Robinhood Social once it launches.

Still, with the growth in Robinhood’s user adoption since 2013 and the rise of meme stocks and communities like r/wallstreetbets, retail investors are inevitably growing more sophisticated, at least in pockets. Under pressure to open up private markets to main-street investors, the Trump administration has responded with an executive order to allow private equity and alternative investments in 401(k) portfolios. As AI reshapes labor markets, we may see more people with nontraditional finance backgrounds take on the role of capital allocators. Given that investing is as much a question of temperament as competence, it’s not clear whether they would do any worse than today’s money managers, who rarely outperform the market.

In some respects, a financial social network could help the market become more efficient. Tenev hopes Robinhood Social will be a place where new news is broken and new information is shared. He views prediction markets as “the news faster.” On the other hand, market transitions often bring new ways to commit fraud, which will challenge Robinhood’s verification mechanisms to evolve quickly enough to tamp it down.

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