Robinhood Is Launching a Social Media Platform

Robinhood is encroaching on Reddit’s territory.

At the company’s annual “Hood Summit in” Las Vegas on Tuesday, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev announced that the company is building a social media platform where users can post their trades and track what other investors are buying or selling.

Robinhood Social will show users a “for you” page that recommends trades that are trending or those they’d be interested in, said Abhishek Fatehpuria, the vice president of product management at Robinhood, during a live demo on Tuesday.

The platform will also show publicly reported trades from hedge funds and politicians, he said.

Users can check the performance of a post’s author to see exactly when someone bought or sold a security and how much profit or loss they made.

The brokerage will roll out a beta version of the platform to roughly 10,000 users in the first quarter of next year, with a wider launch date yet to be announced.

Robinhood was a major player in the meme stock mania of January 2021, which involved throngs of inexperienced investors using Robinhood to buy stocks of companies like GameStop and AMC Entertainment after discussing them on Reddit.

Related stories

Robinhood faced backlash for suddenly restricting trading on these meme stocks and for gamifying short-term investing, which critics say poses serious financial risks. Lawmakers and billionaire Warren Buffett have accused the company of treating the stock market like a casino.

In 2021, Tenev and Wall Street hedge fund managers were questioned in a congressional inquiry into the GameStop trading event. In 2023, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, saying that customer agreements allowed the company to limit transactions.

Robinhood, which was founded in 2013, went public in 2021 and is now worth about $105.3 billion. It’s one of the latest companies to join the benchmark S&P 500 index.

Robinhood is up 218% so far this year.