Robinhood debuts Legend for active traders, says futures markets coming

Retail brokerage firm Robinhood is launching a new tool for more sophisticated traders as it looks for additional avenues for growth.

The firm introduced Robinhood Legend, a desktop-based platform for active traders. The offering includes advanced charting tools for users who want to do detailed analysis of stocks.

“In looking at the landscape of trading tools and by talking with active traders, we realized there is frustration with legacy offerings,” Steve Quirk, chief brokerage officer at Robinhood, said in a press release.

“Specifically, moving back and forth between apps or charting platforms can be cumbersome and time consuming. So we set out to reimagine what a modern, intuitively designed active trading platform should look like, and built Robinhood Legend from the ground up so traders can do what they need in one place,” Quirk said.

Beyond the launch of Legend, Robinhood also said it will soon add futures trading and index options to its mobile platform. Customers must be granted approval to trade futures contracts, according to the press release, and futures and index options will eventually be added to Legend as well.

The new additions for Robinhood are another example of the firm looking to expand beyond its roots as a convenient platform for small-dollar traders. The firm’s rise coincided with the “meme stock” phenomenon in early 2021 as retail trading boomed in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since then, Robinhood has been steadily adding new offerings, including a credit card for Robinhood Gold subscribers and a digital wallet to hold cryptocurrencies.

“We’ve done very well on mobile historically among younger people and folks that primarily invest and trade on mobile. But about half of the market is on desktop web, where you have more real estate on the screen, you can do more sophisticated things like have charts and data in the same interface. And so we weren’t really a player in that space,” Robinhood CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Robinhood said it had $139.7 billion in assets under custody at the end of the second quarter, along with 11.8 million monthly active users. For the comparable quarter in 2021, near the height of the GameStop mania, Robinhood reported $102 billion in assets but 21.3 million monthly active users. The firm’s next earnings report is scheduled for Oct. 30.

Shares of Robinhood are up more than 100% so far this year.

The announcements on Thursday were part of the HOOD Summit, a conference for Robinhood’s customers.