Robinhood bets on the future of retail investing: betting

What they're saying: "Robinhood is ushering in a new era in which AI and prediction markets will come together to change the future of finance and news," CEO Vlad Tenev said.

• Robinhood says more than 1 million customers have traded 11 billion contracts since its prediction markets feature made its debut late last year.
• Prediction market trading is already the fastest-growing revenue line in Robinhood's history.
• But customers asked for more, which in part pushed Robinhood to emphasize the prediction markets portion of today's announcement, which was originally going to be more focused on its new AI tools.

Zoom in: The prediction markets hub will allow dollar-based trading and thousands of new live events across politics, economics, culture and sports for users to access and bet on 24/7.

• Customers will be able to trade preset combos: If multiple outcomes occur within a single game, the user could make money.
• Today, customers can track football player performances within the app, and player contracts for more sports will roll out soon.
• In 2026, custom combos will be available.

Caveat: It's unclear to me how combos are different from parlays, the traditional term used to describe betting on multiple outcomes within one game. (Thank you to my fiancé for getting me to where I am today in my sports knowledge.)

Between the lines: Prediction market companies could see five-fold revenue growth by 2030, according to analysts at Citizens.

• Robinhood wants to ensure it cements itself as a key player in that space, especially as betting markets could continue to dominate what we currently think of as retail investing.

Robinhood is also launching Cortex, an on-platform AI assistant that will allow users to chat through trading ideas and enact orders once it rolls out early next year for its Gold subscribers, who pay a fee to get additional tools.

• In a demo, I saw Cortex prompted with questions like "find five stocks that have been unfairly punished by the market" and "how to trade the 49ers game."
• Cortex has access to real-time market data, analyst reports and research, which makes it different from ChatGPT, for example.
• Cortex will also be used to power something called Digests, an automated rundown of what's driving your portfolio.

Zoom out: Public launched an AI-powered brokerage last month that lets users build their own ETFs to invest in.

• Oren Naim, Robinhood's vice president of platforms, tells Axios that the team is not building "an advisor or anything like that. The idea is to give you kind of an objective summary ... of both sides of the story. "