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Now we're going to head to that Hood summit because robin Hood's first ever consumer focused summit here is underway in Miami. The retail brokerage announced a host of new features, including futures trading and index options, and joining us from Miami as robin Hood Chairman and CEO, Lad Tenev. You know, I understand that you have hundreds of people there and another two million people nearly viewing online on your live stream. You are looking to expand your product suite for new customers.
I want to point back to just a day ago, Vlad. Also, I spoke to Morgan Stanley's CEO, Ted Pick. He competes with you through their e trade business. He said, the retail trader is really what's driving this next leg of the market. I'm wondering if you can give me a sense of just how much.
Yeah, we've seen definitely retail engagement higher than at levels you'd exp given the high interest rates. So interest rates have been have been elevated but coming down. But I think what we're seeing is a lot of optimism from
the retail community. I mean, we have eight hundred of our most active customers with us in the conference, and as I was going around and talking to a large portion of them, conversation kept coming back to artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, areas that you know, the American economy is very much leading, and I think that's been a source
of all this optimism. Of course, there's been all sorts of problems in the world, geopolitical and otherwise, but I don't think you can deny that in growth sectors like artificial intelligence, financial services, electric vehicles, and renewable energy, America continues to lead, and I think that's the source of the optimism that we've been seeing.
It's interesting you're launching these new products around futures and index options. I'm wondering when you come down to the retail trader, how much more interest is there from them for these derivative products versus plane vanilla spot trading equities.
I think for a certain type of customer that is much more advanced and sophisticated, these products fill fill a need. So, for example, index options, when we talk to our most experienced investors, they like the fact that they can take a position on an entire market in a sector, and they like the fact that since these products are cash settled, they can hould them comfortably up until the market close without having to worry about sellouts and other things like that.
And for futures, if you remember the twenty sixteen election, the market really moved quite a bit and futures was basically the only product that was trading at that time, went from a six percent down to one percent up. And you know, for customers that want to hedge their risk and trade metals and currencies and broad indices, futures are a great value proposition.
And yeah, of course it's interesting to see this launch with nineteen days to go until the US presidential election, and that contact us to what happened in twenty sixteen is nice as well. I want to talk and broaden out and talk about robins Hood's business a little bit more because you're known for running ads, running promos to sort of poach customers from other brokerages. Do you have any metrics that you can share with us about whether or not you've been successful in that endeavor.
Yeah, I mean I have to be careful about things that are more recent since we are in the quiet period. But in the last earnings call, we did talk about how for three quarters in a row. We've been seeing net inflows from all of the incumbent brokers, and actually, as part of the Hood Summit, we announced that we've got multiple, multiple of our offers coming simultaneously as part
of what we call Hoodweek. So that's one percent transfers on brokerage accounts, two percent for customers bring a margin balance of above ten thousand, and three percent for Gold customers bringing in retirement accounts. And I think one of the reasons these have resonated is they're uncapped, so you can basically bring in any amount of money and we
would match you these significant amounts on that. So we've even had customers that are pretty close to retirement age, and you know, they have large retirement accounts, and they're bringing their portfolios over to us because the value proposition of getting that three percent instantly is so strong. So we've seen even older customers than what you might consider sort of like a typical Robinhood customer coming in to take advantage of the new tools and the new capabilities that we offer.
I want to talk about maybe an atypical Robinhood customer. I'm not sure you talk about active traders, and I know, you have you know, two million people logged into your event. You have a new platform for legendary trading, so very active, I'm guessing, and you've got a desktop platform as well. But do you work at all with institutional or say rias. Do you license out your technology to other platforms to use.
We've been getting a lot of requests for that actually, because you know the things that we've rolled out for retail consumers over the past year, you can imagine that they're very interesting for institutions as well. For example, we have twenty four hour market, which allows we became the first retail broker in the US to offer twenty four hour trading of single name stocks. Now that's expanded to over one thousand names, including you know, some of the
most popular ones. We have the lowest margin rates in the industry. So these are things that are very useful to retail. But you can imagine, you know, if you're a hedge fund or other institution or a business you want access to the markets that's useful to you as well, and if you are a registered investment advisor, as you mentioned.
Thus far the focus has been purely on retail. We want to make sure that we're as focused as possible, and we do, frankly, you know, as good of a job as we can on a limited set of things. But I think over time that's a natural expansion opportunity for US institutions care just as much about access to markets and having the lowest possible rates and the best economics.
But I'm also curious about something you mentioned earlier, this kind of interest in the US election cycle. Certainly we have seen a lot of single name trades headed up to that election. We have seen DJT whipsaw quite meaningfully alone, along with other Trump trades in recent days. How are users on your platform trading the election by and large, and how are they reflecting it through the options market, including the spot market.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the interesting developments, and this does this does have to do with futures as well, is the introduction of prediction markets and the
presidential election contracts. That is a recent thing, and I think what customers are really showing is that they need more accurate information and they're turning to some of these alternative sources, not just as a mechanism to trade and hedge risk, but just as a way to kind of get away from the cloudiness and murkiness of these poles.
I think polls have lost a lot of their power and credibility over the past few years, and some of these alternative markets, people are putting real money on the line, and I think the signal for that is very strong and powerful.
All Right, glad we got to leave it there. Really appreciate you taking time. That is Robinhood, CEO of lad ten of joining us from Miami