(FLASH FRIDAY is a weekly content series looking at the past, present and future of capital markets trading and technology. FLASH FRIDAY is sponsored by Instinet, a Nomura company.)
Robinhood is having a good week.
First, HOOD stock has gained about 20% on news that the retail brokerage will be added to the benchmark S&P 500 Index.
Second, Robinhood apparently had a successful HOOD 2025 Summit in Las Vegas. Traders Magazine has never attended the event (perhaps our invitation got lost in the mail?), but it seems like a mini-version of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska – i.e. a brand- and loyalty-building confab of people connected to one enterprise, all networking and talking shop under one roof.
At HOOD 2025, Robinhood announced various new trading products meant to improve the user experience of its core customers – active traders.
We found the most interesting product to be the first one announced: Robinhood Social. The company says Robinhood Social will be a community where users can follow other Robinhood traders, swap strategies, discuss market performance, and “trade with clarity.”
But wait. Online social networks for stock trading have been around for a long time, since the advent of the internet really. Yahoo! message boards were all the rage in the late 1990s / early 2000s when the stock market was hot and retail traders were piling in.
So the concept is the same. But the difference between Yahoo! Message boards and Robinhood Social can be expected to be as vast as the difference between trading 25 years ago and trading now.
The Traders Magazine Editor is old enough to remember the Yahoo! boards, and even being persuaded suckered into buying a dinky biotech stock named Cytogen (CYTO), which some posters insisted was the next big thing. (The bad news I got hosed; the good news is I was in my 20s and my risk capital was maybe a few thousand bucks.)
A 2021 Yahoo! Finance article recounts those days. Yahoo! and other boards “served as open forums for investors to anonymously float ideas during the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000. And just as the myriad of dot-com stocks included stories of fraud, so did posts on message boards, where some furious posters met their fates with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).”
Trust and credibility were lacking, to understate it, 25 years ago. That’s one of the aspects that will be way different with Robinhood Social, where users can “Check 1 year and daily P&L, profit rate, and dive into past trades for the people you’re most interested in … you can trust that every customer profile belongs to a real person, verified through KYC.”
To be sure, Robinhood Social is hardly the only offering of its type – Reddit and StockTwits are just two of the established stock-trading networks. But those firms aren’t brokers – Robinhood has the advantage of being a one-stop shop for traders looking to trade and to exchange information. So Robinhood Social will have a built-in network of potential users when it rolls out next year.
Since its founding in 2013, Robinhood has expanded its customer base to 27.4 million funded accounts, of which 75% are Gen Z or Millennials. So the company has a blueprint for success, and if Robinhood Social were its own standalone stock, Traders Magazine would rate it BUY.
