Robinhood Markets 2026 Wolfe Research Wealth Symposium

Yeah, maybe I'll start off with saying that we had our highest equity trading day last Thursday in our history, which is saying something when you think about Robinhood in the 2020 and 2021 era. That's a hard number to surpass. We surpassed it pretty significantly from a trading standpoint on the equity side. I'll just use that as sort of a way to kind of back into what customer behaviors look like. Remember, the average age of a Robinhood customer is 30s, and so we get asked often how we are the face of retail because we have 28 million plus customers. When we have volatile markets, we frequently are in the media talking to the media about what customers are doing, how they're behaving, they're curling up, et cetera, et cetera.

We can see it in deposits, we can see it in trading activity, we can just see it in sectors that they're buying and how they're performing overall. In a word, I'd say they're aggressive. They're cautiously aggressive, and what I mean by that is, they buy the dips. That's rewarded them. If you look at through probably most of their investing career, buying the dips has worked really well. The question becomes, this follow-on question is, what happens when there isn't a bounce back after a dip? The response that we have and our customers would say to them if they were speaking directly is, "We're 30. We have 30 more years of investing. We can look back to 1950 and see what the average return was." Will we have periods where there will be markets that might have a couple years of being down?

I do not know. Probably. Historically, if you look at it, there will be. But if I am investing with a duration that is 30 years, I have to be more proactive than I would be if I am somebody who is 50, 60, or So the composition of the way that our customers behave is different than I came from Schwab, I came from TD Ameritrade. It is very different because their investing duration is shorter, so they have capital preservation as a higher priority. So that kind of is what we are seeing. That and now you brought up crypto as well. Again, crypto is much more of a price-sensitive asset than equities or other asset classes. It is as price-sensitive as an asset as I think I have, in my career, that I have ever seen.

Donnie, I can never say what the behavior is going to be going forward, because I actually wasn't at Robinhood at that period of time. I was at a competitor. I think that capitulation kind of happened broadly across the industry, regardless of segment. I can't anticipate what would happen should we end up in that environment again. I would point out, there's been a lot written about the COVID period and who kind of rescued the market, and it wasn't institutions. It was retail that was stepping in all the most battered names, and they were rewarded for doing so. I think it'll be Look, every market is going to be different, and the behaviors will be different, but I experienced this. I'll tell you a very funny story.

I'm that super annoying finance father of three daughters that work, just in the working space, just getting going, and I'm like, "Your money's going to work as hard as you work for your money, right?" You would need to open a brokerage account, put your money to work, et cetera. Every time the market goes down, they call me up and yell at me, like I'm the market. I'm like, "I am not the market, okay?" "Well, why'd you tell me to invest?" "I didn't tell you to invest. You made your own decision in what you're investing in." They now all do recurring investments, which means essentially, if you want to put $200 in a month, it goes in on a certain date into all the ETFs and stocks that they wanted to buy.

I said, "Just don't look at it." I can't use the word guarantee because it's not allowed in my business, but I will assure you, in 20 years, you will thank me. It takes all the emotion out of it. I think there are a lot of people who are younger that just, that's a good way to invest, right? You don't have to be in the market every day looking at it, to really have a positive investing journey. That's kind of the way they do it today.