Robinhood just put AI agents, 10x perps and weekend stock trading in one app

Robinhood spent Tuesday in Houston describing a version of retail trading with almost no off switch. At its HOOD Summit the brokerage announced weekend trading in U.S. equities, crypto perpetual futures with leverage of up to 10 to 1, longer options hours, intraday margin of up to 4:1, contracts that settle on corporate earnings metrics, and an in-app AI agent that can place trades while the customer sleeps. Shares rose about 3% in early premarket trading Wednesday.

Closing the weekend gap

Robinhood launched its 24 Hour Market in 2023, which runs from 8 p.m. ET Sunday through 8 p.m. ET Friday. The gap it never closed is the weekend. The company now says it will offer a curated list of stocks and ETFs on Saturdays and Sundays through Bruce ATS, an institutional-grade alternative trading system, pending regulatory review. No launch date was given.

The competitive context is that Robinhood is not alone in pushing at the boundaries of the trading session. Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have filed to expand their own trading hours. What an ATS provides in the meantime is a venue that operates outside exchange hours, which is how weekend equity trading becomes possible before the exchanges themselves get there.

Weekend equity markets have a structural characteristic worth understanding rather than a verdict worth issuing: liquidity outside regular hours is thinner, which typically means wider spreads between bid and ask and a larger gap between the last trade on Sunday night and the opening print on Monday. That is a mechanical feature of any low-volume session, not a claim about any particular stock.

Perpetual futures arrive onshore

The more novel piece is perpetual futures. 'Perps' have no expiry date, which is what distinguishes them from conventional futures, and their profit and loss is settled at intervals rather than at a delivery date. They became the dominant instrument on offshore crypto exchanges precisely because of that structure, and regulatory constraints have kept them largely out of reach of U.S. retail traders.

Robinhood plans to offer them through Robinhood Derivatives with support from Bitstamp, the exchange it acquired, starting with eight crypto products covering bitcoin, ether, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, ADA, LINK and HYPE. Bitcoin and ether contracts will carry leverage of up to 10x; the others start at 3x. The company said pricing will be one basis point — 0.01% — per trade through the end of the year.

'Robinhood is bringing America its first true perps. No expiry, with P&L settled every 15 minutes,' chief executive Vlad Tenev wrote on X, calling it a 'new chapter for U.S. derivatives.'

Leverage is the part of that sentence that carries the consequences. A 10x position moves ten times as fast in both directions, and in a perpetual contract there is no expiry to force a resolution — the position persists until it is closed or liquidated. None of that is a judgment on the product; it is the arithmetic of the product.

The agent that trades for you

Robinhood Agents is the announcement with the longest tail. The tool sits inside the app, can research markets, build strategies and place trades at any hour, and runs on models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic. It follows a more limited May launch that let technically capable users connect their own agents; the company says more than 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts since, and that those agents now call Robinhood's tools roughly 30 million times a day. Robinhood reports more than 27 million funded accounts overall.

Coming next is a feature called Loops, which converts a strategy into a standing instruction the agent repeats indefinitely — check the market each morning and act when conditions are met, or run overnight while the customer is asleep.

The disclosures are unusually direct. Customers 'assume all risk for trades executed by AI agents and for any use of your data by third-party LLM providers,' the company said, adding that Robinhood 'does not control, supervise, monitor, recommend, or audit agents.' On Loops specifically, the disclosure warns that once switched on the feature 'may place, modify, or cancel trades in your account automatically, without prompting you for approval on each transaction — including while you're asleep, away from your device, or otherwise not monitoring the market.' Trades already placed by a Loop are not automatically reversed when it is turned off.

What the bundle is actually for

Read together, the announcements point at one customer: the active trader who currently splits time between a brokerage app, a crypto exchange and a prediction market. Weekend hours, perps, earnings-metric contracts, extended options sessions and more intraday margin are all features that matter to someone trading frequently and to almost nobody who buys an index fund twice a month.

That is a strategic choice with a revenue logic behind it — derivatives and crypto carry different economics than equity order flow — and also a regulatory surface. Perpetual futures for U.S. retail customers, 24/7 equity venues and automated agents placing trades are each an area where rules are still being written. Robinhood itself attached 'pending regulatory review' to the weekend equities plan.

For the rest of the market, the read-through is narrower than the headlines suggest. If weekend equity trading gains volume, the Monday opening auction carries less of the weekend's news than it does today. If agentic trading scales, a slice of retail order flow starts responding to events on a machine's clock rather than a person's. Neither is measurable yet. Both are worth tracking as the products actually ship.