Vlad Tenev
Chief executive of Robinhood, the retail brokerage that pushed zero-commission trading into the mainstream and now offers prediction markets and tokenized share...
“Over 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts with us in the few months since we've launched it. The tool calls have just been following this smooth exponential. The last number we announced was something like 30 million tool calls per day.”
No Priors · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026
Context
Asked whether people will actually let AI agents trade for them, Tenev describes Robinhood's agent product, which began as an MCP server. He says agentic trading is one of two areas of agentic finance that already has product-market fit.
Transcript
…them together in new ways. And I don't want to presuppose what developers come up with because I wouldn't have been able to tell you that stock token linked NFTs or stock token meme pairs would become a thing. Like I just had no way to foresee how quickly those things would grow and become real.
It's not necessarily ownership. What is your perspective on prediction markets?
Yeah, I mean, I actually think prediction markets do tie into ownership because a lot of people have unique knowledge and ideas and they have hot takes on things that maybe not everyone knows. Like you might be an expert in AI model development. You know, we have lots of contracts that allow you to speculate and hedge on what AI model will be best this week or this month or this year. And the way to kind of like monetize that knowledge before prediction markets was highly indirect. Like maybe you could trade derivatives on, you know, Google stock or NVIDIA stock. Sounds imprecise, yeah. Yeah. And so there is an important thing with being able to monetize your own knowledge and doing it more directly. It's actually one of the reasons we announced and were planning to launch KPI contracts. So for a long time, if you wanted, like say you're studying, let's say you're studying a company and you have a pretty good idea that it's going to beat earnings, EPS or revenue. Well, in the past, if you bought the stock or you bought like an option on…
Do you think people will let agents trade for them and when? And what's the impact of that?
Yeah. So we launched a product earlier this year, which is basically a Robinhood MCP. We call it Agentic Trading, Harmonic: we have Agentic Trading, Card as well. So in the broader realm of Agentic Finance, I think there's two things that have product market fit. One is Agentic Trading, Harmonic…
Amazing. What do you think the impact is of this on either participant mix or financial infrastructure? Just because many of these things that you describe, institutional traders have the ability to do this, but it's expensive and sophisticated, right? And so if that's democratized, what does that…
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