MW What it was like at Robinhood's Hood Summit: DJs, go-karts and invite-only parties for active traders

By Gordon Gottsegen

Robinhood invited its most engaged customers to Las Vegas and gave them the VIP treatment - because they're too valuable to lose

Robinhood hosted a VIP event in Las Vegas for the online brokerage's active traders.

Much has been said about the supposed death of Las Vegas - but earlier this week, just off the Vegas Strip at the F1 Grand Prix Plaza, where the world's greatest race-car drivers are scheduled to compete in a few months, a crowd of stock traders lined up to race go-karts.

These amateur racers were all active traders personally invited by Robinhood Markets Inc. (HOOD) to attend Hood Summit, the online brokerage's second annual conference specifically geared toward its most engaged customers. Robinhood put on the event not only to announce the latest updates to its trading platform, but also to put its customers in the driver's seat - providing early access to new tools and asking attendees what they want most from the platform.

On the surface, the conference seemed like a party. There were DJs, food and drinks, goodie bags, raffles and an air of excitement. Robinhood was willing to pull out all the stops for these active traders, renting out convention centers and giving attendees a free two-night stay at a Vegas hotel.

While many of the active traders were just happy to be there and enjoy what Las Vegas had to offer, the event was a calculated move for Robinhood. The company was happy to wine, dine and party with this crowd because it was the exact demographic of retail trader coveted by the brokerage industry. These are the customers that Robinhood needs most for the future of its business - and which the company and its competitors are fighting over.

A Robinhood trader circles a go-kart track at Hood Summit 2025 in Las Vegas.

Who are these traders?

All of the individual investors invited to Hood Summit were active traders on the Robinhood platform. But that was one of the few things they had in common.

There were Gen Z-ers, baby boomers and every age in between. Some attendees came with their spouses and some brought their children. They flew in from places like New Jersey, California, Texas and Florida, while some were local. There were wealthy investors who wore designer clothes, and working-class investors who wore free Robinhood-branded swag.

Their trading styles were diverse, too. They traded things like stocks, crypto, options, futures and event contracts. Some classified themselves as swing traders; others did technical analysis, sold options or stockpiled dividends. However, many didn't neatly fit into one trading style and dabbled with all sorts of things.

"I love everything Robinhood," said Sherif Ahamed, an investor from Brooklyn, N.Y. "I use every product they have."

Ahamed started investing with Robinhood in 2017. He considers himself a fundamentals investor, but also noted that he recently started trading futures once they became available on the platform.

Ever since commission-free trading became popular in 2019, a new wave of retail investors has taken the market by storm. These are the investors who popularized meme stocks, made crypto mainstream and took over a chunk of the options market. In 2025, retail trading is more popular than ever, and everyday people are dumping record amounts of cash into the stock market.

Robinhood is the brokerage at the center of this new investing movement. In 2020, the app gained millions of new users - about half of whom had never invested before. Robinhood had about 18 million accounts by the summer of 2021, which put it in direct competition with bigger legacy brokerages like Charles Schwab Corp. $(SCHW)$ and Fidelity Investments.

Read more: Robinhood's Vlad Tenev has led a trading revolution to become a new Wall Street power

Tobias Roeder, an investor from Maryland, switched over to Robinhood from Schwab last year; he said he transferred over his retirement account to Robinhood in order to take advantage of its 1% match promotion. But ultimately, he said, it was Robinhood's advanced desktop trading platform, Robinhood Legend, that convinced him to take the brokerage seriously.

For many, Robinhood has a reputation as an easy-to-use app built for novice investors. Some of its competitors hold this belief, too.

Steve Quirk, Robinhood's chief brokerage officer, used to work at TD Ameritrade before joining Robinhood. At the time, he and his peers thought Robinhood "cracked the code" when it came to bringing a new generation of investors to its platform. But Robinhood's offerings used to be so limited that some of those investors would graduate to other brokerages once they became more knowledgeable.

If they wanted to day trade, they could use Schwab's Thinkorswim and take advantage of its in-depth charting. If they wanted access to algorithmic trading or international markets, they could try Interactive Brokers Group Inc.'s $(IBKR)$ platform. Or if they wanted access to proprietary ETFs and funds, they could invest with Fidelity. Many of these trading tools weren't available on Robinhood.

This posed a risk for Robinhood: Those sophisticated retail investors are valuable to a brokerage. They often have larger accounts or are more active traders, and both of these things mean more business revenue. That put pressure on Robinhood to figure out how to keep them around.

Many of the active traders at Hood Summit cut their teeth on the Robinhood platform, and followed an investing journey similar to Aaron Cook, a young plumber from Florida. Cook first started trading on Robinhood in 2019; one of his earliest memorable trades was buying call options for Walmart Inc. $(WMT)$ and Microsoft Corp. $(MSFT)$ in 2020. At the time, there was news that the social-media app TikTok would be banned from operating in the U.S. unless it was purchased by a U.S. company. Both Walmart and Microsoft were rumored as potential buyers, which convinced Cook to trade those companies.

He remembers loading up his Robinhood account while he was at work to watch the stock market open. Overnight, Cook was able to turn his $800 options into more than $12,000.

"I made nothing back in the day," Cook told MarketWatch. "I probably made like $20,000 a year, so that was like half of my whole income."

After that trade, Cook dove into the trading deep-end. He's tried scalping, swing trading and momentum trading. He uses technical analysis and is comfortable trading zero-day options. He said trading has changed his life.

"I'm addicted to stocks," he said.

Cook said he was a self-taught trader who learned to invest on the Robinhood app. Despite that, he still relied on other platforms for certain things. He had an account with Webull Corp. $(BULL)$ in order to access the platform's advanced charting and social-media feed. He also had an account with Merrill Lynch because he likes to keep his safe investments separate from his trading accounts.

At last year's Hood Summit, Cook ran into Quirk and asked him to add the ability to open multiple investment accounts on Robinhood. This year, he got what he wanted.

A crowd of Robinhood traders watched CEO Vlad Tenev deliver his keynote address at Hood Summit 2025 in Las Vegas.

A shift toward advanced, active traders

On Tuesday evening in the Grand Prix Plaza, Robinhood Chief Executive Vlad Tenev walked onstage wearing a Robinhood-branded racing suit to give a keynote address. He asked the audience what makes racing so exciting. Various members of the audience shouted out their answers, but Tenev gave his own reason: Racing is exciting for the individual performance.

"You can think of tonight as celebrating individual performance," Tenev said to the crowd.

He then asked various members of the Robinhood team to come onstage and "compete" by sharing the new Robinhood features they were working on, and highlighting the best parts of those features in under a minute. There was a lightning round of announcements - new features for Robinhood Legend, short-selling capabilities, updated ladders and futures trading and, of course, multiple accounts.

On stage, Quirk gave Cook a shoutout when talking about the new multiple-accounts feature, remembering the time they spoke last year.

The newly announced features represent a change that's happening at Robinhood. While the Robinhood app was once known as an investing platform for beginners, the product is gradually shifting to service more advanced and active investors.

"Many first-time investors eventually will become active traders. And on that journey, they just become more engaged and consequently more valuable customers," Tenev told MarketWatch.

These active traders make Robinhood more money. The company generates most of its money from "transaction-based revenue," which is what it makes when its users place a trade. In the second quarter of 2025, Robinhood made $539 million from transaction-based revenue.

Not every trade is equal when it comes to Robinhood's bottom line; the company makes more money when a user trades an option contract or crypto, as opposed to a stock. And new features like futures and prediction markets offer juicy margins as well.

The combination of new features and more active customers are part of the reason why Robinhood's average revenue per user climbed 34% year over year in the second quarter. Robinhood has an incentive to get its customers trading more.

However, Quirk told MarketWatch that it's a balancing act, and brokerages can't push their clients too hard to trade.

"Every brokerage firm is aligned with their customers. If their customer does well, they're not leaving a brokerage firm," he said. "If you consciously put out products and try to entice people to trade more than they should, they're likely going to flame out."

-Gordon Gottsegen

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September 13, 2025 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)

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