Robinhood shares up 8% after launching betting markets hub
Robinhood has launched a betting markets hub as the online brokerage — best known for stock trading — expands its presence in emergent asset classes, including cryptocurrencies and event contracts, according to a March 17 announcement.
Robinhood’s stock, HOOD, rose roughly 8% on the Nasdaq after the announcement, according to data from Google Finance.
The new betting feature will let users “trade contracts for what the upper bound of the target fed funds rate will be in May, as well as the upcoming men’s and women’s College Basketball Tournaments,” it said.
HOOD’s intraday performance on the Nasdaq on March 17. Source: Google Finance
The online brokerage is tapping Kalshi, the US’ first CFTC-regulated prediction platform, to operate the event contract platform, it said.
Kalshi is already registered to list dozens of event contracts, covering outcomes ranging from election results to Rotten Tomatoes movie ratings.
Prediction markets “play an important role at the intersection of news, economics, politics, sports, and culture,” JB Mackenzie, vice president and general manager of futures and international at Robinhood, said in a statement.
Experts say political betting markets often capture public sentiment more accurately than polls. Platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket accurately predicted US President Donald Trump’s November election win even as polls indicated a tossup.
Related: Robinhood tips Singapore launch, touts memecoin interest: Report
Rising popularity
Prediction markets have become increasingly popular in the US since September 2024, when Kalshi prevailed in a lawsuit challenging a CFTC decision to bar it from listing political event contracts.
By November, trading volumes across popular prediction markets neared $4 billion for contracts tied to the US elections.
Robinhood tested the waters of political event contracts in October when it started letting certain users bet on the outcome of the presidential election between former Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump.
In February, Robinhood suspended Super Bowl betting after receiving a request from the CFTC to nix its customers’ access to the event contracts.
Beyond stock trading
Robinhood has been expanding its footprint in emerging asset classes, including cryptocurrencies and derivatives.
On March 13, the company listed memecoins like Pengu (PENGU), Pnut (PNUT) and Popcat (POPCAT) in a bid to expand its presence in crypto. Back in January, it rolled out futures contracts tied to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC).
Robihood’s latest earnings report shows the firm posted a 700% year-over-year jump in crypto revenues in the fourth quarter of 2024 as Trump’s election win and rising market prices fueled boosted crypto trading.
X Hall of Flame: Memecoins will die and DeFi will rise again — Sasha Ivanov
Reform’s plan was meant to be detailed. Instead, there’s more confusion.
The party had grown weary of the longstanding criticism that their tough talk on immigration did not come with a full proposal for what they would do to tackle small boats if they came to power.
So, after six months of planning, yesterday they attempted to put flesh on to the bones of their flagship policy.
Politics latest: Farage rows back on pledge to deport illegal migrant women and girls
At an expensive press conference in a vast airhanger in Oxford, the headline news was clear: Reform UK would deport anyone who comes here by small boat, arresting, detaining and then deporting up to 600,000 people in the first five years of governing.
They would leave international treaties and repeal the Human Rights Act to do it
But, one day later, that policy is clear as mud when it comes to who this would apply to.
Nigel Farage launched an airport-style departures board to illustrate how many illegal migrants have arrived in the UK. Pic: PA
I asked Farage at the time of the announcement whether this would apply to women and girls – an important question – as the basis for their extreme policy seemed to hinge on the safety of women and girls in the UK.
He was unequivocal: “Yes, women and children, everybody on arrival will be detained.
“And I’ve accepted already that how we deal with children is a much more complicated and difficult issue.”
But a day later, he appeared to row back on this stance at a press conference in Scotland, saying Reform is “not even discussing women and children at this stage”.
Read more:
Farage has a new ‘leave’ campaign – here’s how it could work
He later clarified that if a single woman came by boat, then they could fall under the policy, but if “a woman comes with children, we will work out the best thing to do”.
A third clarification in the space of 24 hours on a flagship policy they worked on over six months seems like a pretty big gaffe, and it only feeds into the Labour criticism that these plans aren’t yet credible.
If they had hoped to pivot from rhetoric to rigour, this announcement showed serious pitfalls.
But party strategists probably will not be tearing out too much hair over this, with polling showing Reform UK still as the most trusted party on the issue of immigration overall.
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