Robinhood is betting that its customers want to trade on absolutely everything.
On Tuesday, the popular stock-trading app unveiled a slate of updates to its prediction markets business, aggressively expanding into sports. Now, Robinhood users can trade contracts tied to specific professional football players’ performances, as well as prepackaged combos for individual games.
Early next year, customers will be able to combine up to 10 outcomes—such as winners, spreads, and totals—into a single, custom-built contract. Robinhood’s news site, Sherwood, is also launching a new sports newsletter, Scoreboard. Eventually, Robinhood plans to launch contracts that span not just multiple games, but also multiple categories—from sports to climate to politics.
“If customers say they’re looking to trade a specific category or specific event, we’re all ears,” Adam Hickerson, Robinhood’s senior director of futures and prediction markets, tells Fast Company.
Robinhood’s entrance into prediction markets can be seen as a natural culmination of the trajectory it set into motion years ago. For the uninitiated, prediction markets allow people to trade on real-world events by buying and selling contracts. These events can range from sports matches to political elections to who Time magazine will name as its Person of the Year.
Since Robinhood launched prediction markets in late 2024, they’ve become the company’s fastest-growing line of business. In the third quarter this year, it reported that users traded 2.3 billion prediction-markets contracts. Then, in October alone, that figure reached 2.5 billion.
The most popular contracts have been in sports. Robinhood maintains that users are not gambling, as trading on the market sets the odds, not the platform itself. Still, the sports contracts tap into an enthusiasm for sports speculation. According to the Pew Research Center, 22% of adults in the U.S. have bet money on sports in the past year. Among men younger than 30, that figure rises to 36%. Robinhood isn’t the only app getting in the game: Fanatics, a global sports platform, just launched a predictions-market app, becoming the first sportsbook to do so.
Some regulators believe decision markets cross the line into gambling. Numerous states have sent Robinhood cease-and-desist letters, demanding prediction markets stop offering sports contracts. In response, Robinhood sued New Jersey and Nevada earlier this year, maintaining that its markets are completely legal.
