Robinhood adds AI trading agents and 10x crypto perpetuals; weekend stock trading waits until early next year

Robinhood used its HOOD Summit in Houston on Tuesday evening to unveil AI agents that can trade inside its app, crypto perpetual futures with up to 10 times leverage, earnings contracts listed through Cboe, and a plan to let customers trade some U.S. stocks and ETFs on weekends. According to the company's own release, most of it is "coming soon", and weekend equities are slated for early next year, pending regulatory review.

That timing is the detail several headlines skipped. Robinhood's existing 24 Hour Market runs from Sunday at 8 p.m. to Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern. The weekend session, run through the alternative trading system Bruce ATS and starting with a curated list of stocks and ETFs, closes the Friday-to-Sunday gap, but not this year. The SEC held a roundtable on preparing for 24-hour trading only on Sept. 17.

Robinhood shares closed at $116.22, down 0.2%, and were at $117.05 in after-hours trading, according to Nasdaq data. The stock's 52-week range is $63.52 to $153.86.

The perpetuals: a cheap fee on a lot of leverage

Eligible U.S. customers will be able to go long or short perpetual futures on Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, Cardano, Chainlink and Hyperliquid, through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp. Bitcoin and Ether contracts carry up to 10x leverage; the rest start at 3x. Through year-end the fee is one basis point, 0.01% per trade.

Our arithmetic on what those terms mean:

• The fee is small. A $10,000 Bitcoin position costs $1 to open at 0.01%.
• The leverage is not. At 10x, $1,000 of margin controls that $10,000 position. A 10% move against it would erase the full $1,000, and a leveraged position is liquidated before it reaches that point. Robinhood says customers will see their liquidation price in real time and get alerts when a position is at risk.
• At 3x on the other coins, a move of roughly a third against the position wipes out the margin.

Robinhood's head of U.S. futures products told CoinDesk the company chose lower leverage for more volatile tokens deliberately and may adjust the limits over time. Perpetuals, which never expire, have historically been associated with offshore exchanges, CoinDesk noted; our story on Coinbase's new clearinghouse covers why leveraged perps have been hard to offer onshore.

Margin doubles during the day

Starting next month, eligible margin customers can opt into up to 4x intraday buying power, up from 2x. On a $25,000 account that is $100,000 of stock during market hours instead of $50,000. A 1% drop on $100,000 is a $1,000 loss, 4% of the account's equity in one move. The release says customers will get push notifications ahead of the close, when lower overnight requirements apply.

Agents, and what they cost

Robinhood Agents let a customer build an AI agent in the app, pick a model, and give it a separate account. The agent can reach only the money in that account, and manual approval of each trade is on by default but can be switched off. A later feature, Loops, will let an agent run a standing instruction around the clock. Robinhood says more than 150,000 customers opened agentic trading accounts since May, and agents call its tools almost 30 million times a day.

The data add-ons are priced separately. Adding up the nine Agent Apps with prices in the release, from Unusual Whales at $30 a month to Visual Crossing weather data at $5, comes to $103 a month, or $1,236 a year, after a one-month free trial. Options hours also extend to 7:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. starting in October.

What traders are watching

Launch dates for agents, Loops and perpetuals, and whether weekend trading clears regulatory review on schedule. Earnings contracts are due to roll out in the coming weeks, ahead of third-quarter reporting. For crypto prices, see our crypto prices board.

Sources: Robinhood; CoinDesk; Nasdaq; SEC. Leverage, margin and cost figures are Chronicle calculations. This is market information, not investment advice.