Authors: Zheng Jie, Jon Ma, Mario Stefanidis, Sam Andrew; Source: Artemis; Compiler: Shaw, Golden Finance

Summary

We believemost investors view Robinhood (ticker HOOD) solely as a cyclical retail brokerage that moves with Bitcoin. This one-sided view ignores a core fact:Robinhood is growing into an all-purpose financial super app for Gen Z and Millennials. We predict that these two groups will inherit one of the largest waves of intergenerational wealth transfer in American history. In our view,Robinhood Gold membership users are expected to become “Amazon Prime members” in the retail financial field, and subscription revenue will form a growth flywheel. Long-term promotion of the company’s revenue quality, higher proportion of recurring revenue, and weakening of overall cyclical fluctuations. The prediction market is an emerging retail asset track, and Robinhood’s monthly active users are already more than 20 times that of leading local distribution products such as Polymarket and Kalshi. Relying on the strong speed of product iteration, the solid user base among Generation Z and Millennials, and the fact that this group is about to receive huge intergenerational wealth transfer dividends, we judge that the per capita asset size of users will continue to rise, and Robinhood will eventually establish itself as the winner in the retail financial industry.

Introduction

This article is a perspective report jointly issued by Artemis Research Company and NIV. Both parties agreed: The market has a cognitive bias towards Robinhood, generally treating it as an investment target highly bound to the crypto market, ignoring its development path of an all-in-one financial super application and the long-term dividends brought by intergenerational wealth transfer. There are two core catalysts that will boost HOOD's stock price in 2026:The surge in prediction market business, SpaceX, and the potential IPO boom of Anthropic and OpenAI giant companies.

Most investors still classify Robinhood as an ordinary retail brokerage and believe that its stock price is highly linked to the trend of Bitcoin. We clarify this inherent perception: The correlation between Robinhood and Bitcoin is significantly weakening. The correlation coefficient between the two has been above 0.70 for most of 2026, and has fallen back to 0.41 recently. The market is currently pricing the stock's valuation, tacitly assuming that its fundamentals are deeply tied to options and cryptocurrency trading cycles. We believe that there are deviations in this pricing logic. As the investment logic of all-round super applications is gradually recognized by the market, the space for valuation mismatch will be repaired.

1. Intergenerational wealth transfer and all-purpose super applications

The median age of Robinhood users is 35. In the next two decades, the wealth of the baby boomers will be transferred to Generation Z and Millennials. This will be one of the largest intergenerational wealth transfers in U.S. history, and Robinhood’s core customer base happens to be the recipient of this wealth. The average account asset size of baby boomer customers in traditional financial institutions is more than 20 times the average account asset size of Robinhood users, which is about US$12,000. However, compared with the established giants, Robinhood's young customer base eliminates the need to stick to existing old assets and has less burden for transformation. The core support for the current development window period is the all-round super application layout. Robinhood has now built a complete product matrix covering investment, pension, savings, consumption, and speculative trading, which is enough to handle the huge funds released by intergenerational transfers.

2. Prediction market has become a new retail asset category

Robinhood platform event prediction contract trading volume soared from US$300 million in the first quarter of 2025 to US$8.8 billion in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of up to 30 times in four quarters. We estimate forecast markets revenue grew from approximately $3 million to $104 million during the same period. This is one of Robinhood's fastest-growing business lines since its launch, and there will be multiple strong catalysts in the future: the World Cup, the U.S. midterm elections, the complete NFL football season, and its self-operated platform Rothera, which is regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and integrates trading and clearing, is officially launched.

We have observed a significant surge in trading volume in the prediction markets of Kalshi and Polymarket, and it is expected that this market enthusiasm will also be reflected in Robinhood's financial report data for the second and third quarters of 2026.

Both of the two major growth benefits are still in their infancy, and the current forward valuation multiples have not yet included these two parts of value.

3. Giant IPOs are expected to boost activity on the retail platform

SpaceX is scheduled to go public in early June and plans to allocate an unprecedented 30% of its shares to ordinary retail investors; conventional IPOs allocate only 5%–10% to retail investors. Anthropic and OpenAI are also expected to launch in the coming months. The scale of fundraising by these companies is unprecedentedly large, and retail investment enthusiasm is very high. This wave of IPOs may significantly increase user activity on the Robinhood platform.

Why Robinhood wins in the wave of wealth transfer: Gold membership creates a growth flywheel that rivals Amazon Prime

The number of gold membership users increased from 1.14 million at the end of 2022 to 4.34 million in the first quarter of 2026, and the scale increased to 3.8 times in about three years. Membership is $5 monthly ($50 annual). According to our calculations, members can receive a comprehensive benefit value of approximately US$880 per year, covering benefits such as higher cash deposit interest rates, individual retirement account matching subsidies, free leverage limits, option trading fee discounts, Robinhood gold credit cards, Morningstar research reports, secondary market depth data, and platform-specific investment strategies.

The key lies in the user structure ratio: Gold members only account for about 16% of the total capital accounts, but hold nearly 79% of the platform’s assets. They are the core group that promotes the continued appreciation of assets. Robinhood's ever-expanding product matrix will help convert more users of its existing 27 million capital accounts into gold members. As the penetration rate of gold membership increases, every indicator with compound interest growth attributes - average revenue per user (ARPU), net deposits, user retention rate, and gross profit margin will all improve simultaneously.

We believeAmazon Prime has transformed Amazon from a mere retailer into a necessity for mass consumption. The Prime subscription model increases user activity, ultimately driving consumer spending on the platform and precipitating a user group with stronger stickiness and higher value. We judge that Robinhood gold membership is expected to replicate this effect, and even make Robinhood the first choice for the next generation of comprehensive financial base.

We judge that the scale of platform user assets is steadily catching up. The average holdings (AUC) of funded account users will increase from $2,700 at the end of 2022 to $11,900 at the end of 2025. Even if this growth rate is maintained, the per capita asset size of Robinhood users is still only about 5% of that of Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Interactive Brokers, and these established institutions all hold long-standing existing customer assets.

Profit structure data shows that the operating leverage effect has emerged. Adjusted EBITDA margin improves from -7% in 2022 to 29% in 2023, 48% in 2024, and 56% in 2025. The company's costs are mainly fixed costs, with technology, operations, administration and management expenses accounting for approximately 70% of the total cost base. Therefore, the incremental profit margin corresponding to new revenue exceeds 70%.

Why Robinhood wins in the prediction market market

We believe this is the most undervalued part of its investment logic by the market.

In our opinion, three major factors determine that the prediction market is a top-all-in-one situation: traffic distribution capabilities, product user experience, and deep integration with users’ overall financial asset system, and Robinhood has the strength to win in all three aspects.

• Advantages of traffic distribution. The platform has 27 million deposit accounts and approximately 13 million monthly active users. Kalsi’s estimated monthly activity is about 5 million, while Polly’s market is only about 500,000. Compared with the second largest native traffic competitor, Robinhood has more than 20 times its user base.

• Product ecological interface. Event prediction contracts can be traded within the same application as stocks, options, and cryptoassets, sharing a set of wallets, bill reconciliation systems, and risk control systems. If an independent prediction market app does not transform into a brokerage model, it will be impossible to replicate this integrated experience.

• Vertically integrated layout. Under Rothera, it is its own exchange and clearing center regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Robinhood can independently control the fee ratio and quickly add new trading categories without paying commissions to third-party exchanges. Vertical integration typically improves revenue margins by 25%–30%, even if realization rates remain unchanged.

We regard the prediction market as a new asset track, analogous to the two major historical opportunities of spot cryptocurrency in 2017 and zero-commission stock trading in 2014. The first two waves confirmed the same pattern: brokerages with retail investor traffic channels will capture the entire track and face revaluation.

How Robinhood relies on the all-round financial super app to achieve profitability

Robinhood’s revenue structure is changing.

The trading business is no longer the company's entire source of revenue. Net interest income, gold membership subscription fees, prediction market business, Robinhood high-interest checking account, gold credit card, pension asset management business (in 2025, partner institution TradePMR will add approximately US$40 billion in consulting and custody assets to the platform), platform investment strategy services, and the fledgling estate planning business, are all independent monetization channels. Each business corresponds to a different financial stage in a user's life, and continues to deepen user binding. Taken together, this set of diversified businesses is driving Robinhood's transformation: from a securities firm that relies heavily on speculative trading commissions and whose revenue fluctuates wildly, it has transformed into a comprehensive financial platform with sustainable income, realizing diversified realization of users' financial needs throughout their life cycle.

Reasons for deviations in market valuation

Robinhood's current stock price corresponds to a price-to-earnings ratio of about 34 times the market's consensus earnings per share forecast for 2027, and its valuation level is roughly the same as Interactive Brokers and Coinbase. But we believe that three core logics prove that HOOD is undervalued:

1. Gold members currently only account for 16% of the total capital accounts. As penetration increases, the platform's average revenue per user (ARPU) has the structural space to move closer to the range of $621-1,410 for established institutions in the long term. The current Robinhood ARPU is only $167. This is not simply a performance forecast, but the long-term growth space that comes with the business model.

2. The prediction market is already one of the fastest-expanding business lines in U.S. retail finance, and Robinhood has a crushing traffic distribution advantage.

3. The company's costs are mainly fixed costs. Even though the platform is still in the business investment expansion stage, the adjusted profit margin before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization has reached 56% in 2025.

There is a cognitive misalignment in industry research coverage: Robinhood spans multiple tracks and does not have an accurately matched analysis framework. Brokerage analysts have insufficient coverage of it; financial technology analysts regard it as a crypto-asset-related target; and encryption track analysts simply classify it as a brokerage. This cognitive divergence often leads to obvious valuation depressions, and stock prices usually wait until performance is realized before completing revaluation, rather than reflecting expectations in advance.

Summary

The market still views Robinhood as a cyclical retail brokerage. But the company's real development direction is different: it is a vertically integrated financial super platform for Generation Z and Millennials. These two young groups will undertake the huge intergenerational wealth transfer of the baby boomers; at the same time, the platform has also incubated a new asset class that is growing rapidly in this cycle - prediction market. The two are superimposed, and Robinhood is essentially a completely different company.

We believe that HOOD’s benchmarking targets should be comprehensive platform companies rather than traditional securities firms. The three major growth flywheels will form a strong compound interest effect: ① Firmly lock in high-potential young customer groups × ② Gold membership drives the continuous appreciation of user assets × ③ Leading position in the prediction market track. Every new gold member will increase single-user revenue; every additional unit of single-user revenue will increase profit margins; every new product launched will further lock in users. The longer this positive cycle lasts, the more stable the company's barriers and long-term competitiveness will be.

We believe that this is not just the short-term market logic of 2026, but the starting point for a new generation of people’s savings, transactions, loans, event gaming and wealth accumulation models to start a decade-long platform transformation.