# Vlad Tenev’s Houston Pitch: A Hedge Fund in Your Pocket—and Markets That Never Close

> Vlad Tenev unveils Robinhood’s AI trading agents, crypto perpetuals and plans for weekend stock trading. What’s rolling out now—and what comes next.

By Lidia Yadlos · September 30, 2026

Canonical: https://blockster.com/vlad-tenevs-houston-pitch-a-hedge-fund-in-your-pocketand-markets-that-never-close

Robinhood wants the next generation of retail investors to arrive with an AI agent.

At its September 29 HOOD Summit keynote in Houston, the company presented a future in which customers can research markets, develop strategies and authorize trades through software embedded in their brokerage app.

Vlad Tenev supplied the line that captured the ambition.

> “It’s like having a nice hedge fund in your pocket,” Robinhood’s chairman and CEO said, according to a published keynote transcript. His own agent has a straightforward name: “Vlad Bot.”

The comparison is a pitch for access to sophisticated tools, rather than evidence that an automated retail account can reproduce a hedge fund’s performance. But it sets up the central question behind Robinhood’s announcements: how much of the investing process will customers hand over to software?

## From Connecting an Agent to Building One Inside the App

Robinhood says more than **150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts** since its May launch, with agents now using its tools almost **30 million times a day**. That measures tool activity—not completed trades or investment returns.

The new [Robinhood Agents experience](https://robinhood.com/us/en/agents/) brings agent creation into the app. Users choose a model, establish a dedicated account and configure controls. The agent can scan markets, review holdings, build watchlists and place trades with the appropriate permissions.

That changes the audience for the technology. Connecting external software requires a degree of technical confidence. Building the experience into an existing investing app puts the decision in front of customers who may never configure an API or connect a separate trading tool.

The product’s appeal will depend on more than how fluently it answers a question. Investors need to understand what it can execute, which funds it can access and when it must ask permission.

[Post from @RobinhoodApp on X](https://twitter.com/RobinhoodApp/status/2105058776017666355)

## The Next Step Is an Agent That Keeps Working

Robinhood’s planned **Loops** feature would turn a strategy into a recurring instruction. An agent could research and trade continuously or on a schedule. The company’s product page still labels Loops as **coming soon**.

That distinction matters. A customer asking an agent to examine a position is making a discrete request. A standing instruction gives the software repeated opportunities to interpret changing information and act.

> Robinhood is also introducing Agent Apps, with 11 participating companies supplying specialized tools and data at launch or shortly afterward.

Examples include Unusual Whales for options activity, Quiver Quantitative for government-related information and Token Terminal for crypto fundamentals.

The business opportunity extends beyond the agent itself: the brokerage becomes a place where investors obtain the information feeding their automated decisions.

## More Hours and More Ways to Trade

The Houston announcements also addressed when customers can trade and which outcomes they can trade.

Robinhood’s [rollout summary](https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/hood-summit-2026-product-announcements/) places crypto perpetual futures with up to **10× leverage** among the products beginning to roll out. Access can reach eligible customers gradually.

Other features remain planned, including weekend equity trading, extended options hours and earnings predictions. The proposed earnings contracts would settle against specified company financial or operating metrics, rather than simply tracking the stock price, and require regulatory approval.

Robinhood’s announcement points to **early 2027** for weekend equities trading, pending regulatory review. The plan concerns a selected stock and ETF offering, not an immediate switch to round-the-clock trading for every security.

Taken together, the announcements suggest a broader ambition: give active traders more occasions to act, more instruments to express a view and more software to help them make those decisions.

[Post from @RobinhoodApp on X](https://twitter.com/RobinhoodApp/status/2105099810076328114?s=20)

## The Account Boundary Matters

Robinhood’s agents operate through dedicated accounts. Trade approvals are switched on by default, allowing customers to review an order before it is placed.

The company says approvals can be configured for automated execution, while customers can pause automations or disconnect an agent. It also warns that agents can misunderstand instructions, use incomplete information and generate losses.

Those questions connect directly with Blockster’s reporting on [NVIDIA and more than 100 organizations developing safeguards for AI agents](https://blockster.com/ai-agents-can-trade-borrow-and-spend-nvidia-and-100-organizations-are-building-the-guardrails). As software gains the ability to transact, permissions and oversight become part of the financial product itself.

For Robinhood, making an agent easy to create is the opening move. The harder test is whether customers can understand its decisions, control its authority and judge its performance once real money is involved.