Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Recently, Robinhood (HOOD) has performed quite strongly, even briefly returning above $100 last night. Unfortunately, it couldn't maintain that level at the close, but I personally remain optimistic about HOOD's future performance.

During this round of downturn, HOOD is one of the few assets I have consistently built positions in (including rebalancing), so I have wanted to write an article about HOOD for quite some time. In previous Odaily tea talks, I shared a brief insight into my accumulation logic, and today I want to take this opportunity to have a detailed discussion since the stock price is looking good. It should be noted that this is not investment advice, nor does it represent the platform's views, just some thoughts I have while building my position in HOOD.

Multi-dimensional Positive Analysis

Regarding the recent reasons for HOOD's rise, you can find many positive explanations from different dimensions.

First, let's look at the fundamentals. Robinhood announced its operating data for May last week, detailed as follows.

• Total Assets: $377 billion, a record high;
• Funded Customers: 27.7 million, a record high;
• Margin Book: $19.5 billion, a record high;
• Event Contracts: 3.9 billion, a record high;
• Cash & Deposits: $18.6 billion, a record high;
• Options ADV: 11.6 million, tied with historical record;
• Equity Volume: $315 billion, the second-highest in history;
• Options Contracts: 231 million, the second-highest in history;
• The only "disappointing" data is Crypto Volume: $12.2 billion, ranked only 16th in historical monthly data…

Some positive factors from the news side may even stir investor emotions more.

• First, in the rapidly growing prediction market, Robinhood has started to siphon revenue from Kalshi through its self-built prediction market Rothera, meaning they no longer need to share related income with Kalshi. For details, you can refer to our article published yesterday, “The first stock in the prediction market concept has appeared!.”
• Second, concerning the IPO landscape, SpaceX's historic IPO brought record-level traffic to Robinhood. More importantly, Robinhood's broker and clearing business, Robinhood Securities, was approved last week to act as an IPO underwriter, meaning Robinhood is likely to take on a more central role in future IPO activities (like Anthropic, OpenAI).
• Then, Robinhood has been selected by the U.S. Treasury to serve as the broker and initial trustee for the “Trump Account.” The so-called "Trump Account" is a tax-deferred investment account program authorized by President Trump on June 9, 2025, under the “Big and Beautiful” act, aimed at establishing government-funded savings accounts for children born between January 1, 2025, and January 1, 2029. This means that in the coming years, millions of American newborns will default to using Robinhood as their brokerage platform. For details, see “Robinhood added a batch of new shareholders, the oldest is 1 year, the youngest is -3 years.”

In terms of market trends, there are more intuitive signals.

• Robinhood director Meyer Malka has been continuously increasing his stake in HOOD recently. In the past week or two, Malka has accumulated over $50 million worth of HOOD.
• Institutions have also given HOOD more positive price expectations. Goldman Sachs maintains a “buy” rating and has raised the target price from $105 to $108; Mizuho’s target price is $115; and Piper Sandler is the most optimistic, predicting a target price of $135.

Personally, the main reason I initially started accumulating HOOD was my optimism regarding its Q2 earnings report. Firstly, I anticipated that in the epic stock market rally, the stock trading-related revenue for this quarter would see a significant surge; secondly, I expected the World Cup to potentially lead to a spike in prediction market trading volumes and the income siphoning effect from Rothera.

However, the reason for shifting a significant portion of my position (mainly residual crypto assets) to HOOD later was based on another logic, which is what this article really wants to discuss.

Substitutes for Altcoins

At the beginning of May, a friend asked me what I had recently bought, and I mentioned HOOD. However, at the time, HOOD had just dropped from above $90 due to disappointing Q1 earnings (mainly due to an unexpected $100 million expense related to the “Trump Account”), and the short-term trend looked quite poor.

My friend asked why, and I briefly explained the reasons above. He thought for a moment and said it was a pity that his position was all locked up, and he had no bullets left. I asked him what he was holding, and as expected, it was mostly altcoins.

I told him at the time: “Instead of having an obsession with altcoins, it’s better to directly switch to HOOD.”

The background for this judgment is that, for a long time, cryptocurrency-related revenue has been an important component of Robinhood's total revenue, and HOOD's stock price has shown a strong correlation with cryptocurrency. However, recently, there have been signs that Robinhood is breaking free from its dependence on cryptocurrency business and is positively detaching from this correlation.

First, let’s look at the cryptocurrency-related revenue situation of Robinhood over the past five quarters. It’s not hard to see that overall, the share of this revenue is declining, with Q1’s share reaching a new low since 2025.

• Q1 2025, total revenue $927 million, cryptocurrency-related revenue $329 million, accounting for 35%;
• Q2 2025, total revenue $989 million, cryptocurrency-related revenue $160 million, accounting for 16%;
• Q3 2025, total revenue $1.274 billion, cryptocurrency-related revenue $268 million, accounting for 21%;
• Q4 2025, total revenue $1.283 billion, cryptocurrency-related revenue $221 million, accounting for 17%;
• Q1 2026, total revenue $1.067 billion, cryptocurrency-related revenue $134 million, accounting for 13%.

Next, let’s look at the intuitive comparison of HOOD with BTC price fluctuations. Since the beginning of this year, HOOD has mostly maintained a similar trend with BTC, but recently, a significant divergence has emerged.

The emphasis on these two points is mainly to illustrate that the valuation logic surrounding HOOD has started to change. In the past, HOOD was often seen as a "shadow stock" of the crypto market, its business performance showed a clear cyclicality along with the bullish and bearish trends of cryptocurrency — when the crypto market soared, retail investors rushed into Robinhood to trade altcoins, fee income surged, and stock prices soared; when the crypto market was sluggish, retail investors retreated, and Robinhood's revenue would quickly decline.

However, now, Robinhood is no longer as highly dependent on the cryptocurrency business as it once was. Even if the crypto market continues to remain in its current lifeless state, its stock trading, prediction markets, Pre-IPO, and new underwriting business are still likely to support its performance growth.

This does not mean that the cryptocurrency market will no longer affect HOOD. On the contrary, if the crypto market returns to a bull market in the future, Robinhood's cryptocurrency trading revenue is likely to explode in tandem, and HOOD will still enjoy the dividends from industry growth.

In simpler terms, the crypto market will still influence HOOD, but HOOD is no longer dependent on the crypto market — if the crypto bull market returns, HOOD will still rise, but if the crypto market continues to remain lifeless, it won't matter to HOOD.

For anyone still hopeful about altcoins but increasingly worried about liquidity depletion, narrative failure, and value capture issues, rather than continuing to put hope in a token that doesn’t know when it will see the next narrative, HOOD may be a safer option with higher margin of safety right now.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。