The LSE Directory / CFD and forex brokers
Robinhood Markets, Inc. (NASDAQ: HOOD), headquartered in Menlo Park, California, operates a mobile and web brokerage app offering commission-free trading in US stocks, ETFs, options and index options, cryptocurrency, futures contracts and prediction-market event contracts. Beyond trading, it offers IRA retirement accounts with a matching contribution, a high-yield cash sweep program, margin lending, and the paid Robinhood Gold subscription tier, which adds research tools, higher margin limits and a larger IRA match. The company targets self-directed retail investors, with an average customer age of about 35, and differentiates from incumbent brokers such as Fidelity or Charles Schwab by charging no per-trade commission and instead earning most of its revenue from payment for order flow (compensation from market makers for routing customer orders), net interest income on customer cash and margin balances, and transaction-based revenue from options, crypto and futures. Its mobile-first, gamified interface (progress animations, confetti on trades) helped drive rapid retail adoption but has also drawn regulatory criticism over "gamification" of trading. Robinhood was founded in April 2013 by Stanford classmates Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, who had previously built trading software sold to hedge funds; the two served as co-CEOs until 2020, when Tenev became sole CEO and Bhatt moved to chief creative officer before departing the company in 2024. Robinhood listed on Nasdaq on July 29, 2021 at $38 a share, raising about $2.1 billion, and joined the S&P 500 index in September 2025. As of early 2026 it reported roughly 27.4 million funded customers, 29.1 million investment accounts and about $307 billion in assets under custody, with 2025 revenue of $4.47 billion and net income of $1.88 billion. The company's regulatory record includes a $65 million SEC settlement in December 2020 over undisclosed payment-for-order-flow practices, a $57 million FINRA penalty in June 2021 (at the time FINRA's largest ever) tied to the March 2020 outages and options-approval failures, and a $26 million FINRA penalty in March 2025 for anti-money-laundering deficiencies. In January 2021 it restricted buy orders in GameStop and other volatile stocks during the meme-stock short squeeze to meet a sudden clearinghouse collateral call, an episode that triggered congressional hearings and litigation that was ultimately dismissed. In 2024 and 2025 Robinhood expanded outside the US, launching UK stock and ADR trading in March 2024 and, after securing EU MiFID and MiCA licenses in mid-2025, tokenized stock and ETF trading for EU customers. It also broadened its product base through acquisitions, including the crypto exchange Bitstamp for about $200 million and Canadian platform WonderFi for about $180 million in 2025, wealth-management platform TradePMR, and a futures-brokerage business from Marex that let it offer regulated futures trading. In January 2026 a joint venture with Susquehanna International Group completed the acquisition of the MIAXdx prediction-market exchange, extending Robinhood's push into event-contract trading.
