Robinhood Opens Weekend Stock Trading and 10x Crypto Perps in Active-Trader Push

Robinhood will let U.S. customers trade a selection of stocks and ETFs on Saturdays and Sundays, offer crypto perpetual futures with up to 10 times leverage, and hand trade execution to artificial-intelligence agents, the brokerage announced Tuesday at its HOOD Summit in Houston.

The weekend equities service runs through Bruce ATS, an alternative trading system, and fills the gap left by Robinhood's 24 Hour Market, which launched in 2023 but still closes on weekends. Perpetual futures — contracts that let traders hold leveraged long or short positions with no expiry date — will be offered to eligible U.S. customers through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp, starting with crypto. Bitcoin and ether contracts carry leverage of up to 10 times; other supported tokens start at three times.

Leverage cuts both ways. A modest move against a heavily leveraged position can force a liquidation, and Robinhood said it chose lower limits for more volatile tokens and could adjust them over time. "We do know a lot of people who trade perps want the leverage," Grace Q, the company's head of U.S. futures products, said. "But we wanted to start off a little safer with especially the long-tail coins."

The company is also extending options trading hours, offering more intraday margin and adding binary contracts through Cboe that let customers bet on whether companies hit revenue, earnings-per-share or, for Apple, iPhone sales targets.

Agents that trade, with a catch

Robinhood Agents, announced earlier this year, lets a customer build an AI agent inside the app using a model from OpenAI or Anthropic, connect it to a separate trading account, and have it analyze markets, build watchlists and trade stocks, options and crypto. A feature called Loops will allow standing instructions, so an agent can watch for conditions and act without a fresh prompt.

The company said more than 150,000 agentic accounts have been created since it opened its trading infrastructure to outside AI agents, generating millions of daily calls to its tools. By default, customers must approve each trade an agent proposes, though that safeguard can be switched off. Agents cannot borrow on margin at launch and can only reach funds in their dedicated account. Robinhood is also selling access to external data agents can use, including options information from Unusual Whales, market data from Nasdaq, crypto data from Token Terminal and government activity tracked by Quiver Quantitative.

"I would think of the agent as an extension, like a trading tool that's mainly for research that can execute trades," Gina Pasqua-Abeles, a senior director of product management, said. "We do expect users to still have some level of oversight over what their agent is doing."

The rollout lands in a crowded field. Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers and Fidelity have all broadened their trading products to court investors accustomed to crypto venues that never close, and both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have filed to extend their hours. Robinhood's product chief, Abhishek Fatehpuria, told CoinDesk that being first for active traders is among the company's top priorities and that it is not favoring one asset class over another. The aim, he said, is an account where a trader can sell stocks and buy crypto, or sell crypto and move into prediction markets, while paying less attention to the traditional market clock.