Robinhood: “We’ve matured from our pandemic days. This is a serious financial platform now… built for responsible traders and investors.”

Also Robinhood: “Anyway, would you like to build a 10-leg NFL parlay?”

Late last night while I was putting together a new TV, Robinhood announced it’s juicing up its fastest-growing product (prediction markets) by letting users trade what are, for all practical purposes, NFL parlays and prop bets, just wrapped in a Bloomberg terminal presentation.

You can now bet on game outcomes, totals, spreads, and individual player performances in real time. Touchdowns. Passing yards. Rushing yards. Receiving yards. If a guy sneezes on third down, give it six months and there’ll be a contract for it.

And starting next year, Robinhood plans to let users combine up to 10 outcomes across NFL games into custom “combos” that, according to Robinhood executives, will structurally look and feel like a parlay.

But don’t call it gambling. Call it financial innovation.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the journey here. Robinhood spent years swearing up and down that it had matured. For instance, remember when they got rid of the confetti after placing trades because they wanted to be associated with the who’s who of investing and not WallStreetBets?

Well, here we are in 2025 and the app is quietly morphing into DraftKings with a brokerage license. Presidential election betting is already live. NFL player props are now fair game. Parlays are officially part of the program. And if you think it stops there, don’t worry… it won’t be long before you’re parlaying inflation data, a Senate vote, and whether Travis Kelce retires or gets married first, all in one beautifully “non-gamified” trade.

According to Robinhood, they’re even exploring combos that stretch beyond sports… pairing economic data, elections, climate events, and policy decisions into tradeable contracts.

At some point, you’ll be able to bet on CPI coming in hot and Congress fumbling a vote and it raining in Phoenix… all in one tidy little position.

(Source: GuruFocus)

Robinhood’s pitch is that this is all about giving users more “advanced order types” and “new customer experiences.” Translation: our users are already doing this elsewhere, and we’d like the revenue, please.

And that revenue is real. Prediction markets are already pulling in $100 million in annualized revenue, with 11 billion contracts traded by over 1 million users. Based on recent trends, Robinhood says it’s on pace to become a $300 million business.

November alone saw more than 3 billion contracts traded, up 20% from October… which was already busier than the entire third quarter combined. In other words, this thing is growing at the same rate as whatever conspiracy Candace Owens decides to commit the next month of airtime to.

And sure there’s a buttload of competition, but Vlad wants you to know he doesn’t care. Robinhood is now going head-to-head with traditional sportsbooks, Interactive Brokers, Kalshi, Polymarket, and basically anyone else letting people speculate on reality. The difference is that Robinhood already owns the user relationship.

As Dan Dolev from Mizuho put it, Robinhood and Coinbase users are nine times more likely than non-users to participate in prediction markets. 

And more importantly, other Wall Street analysts are joining the glaze fest. Piper Sandler calls prediction markets a significant growth opportunity. And Others think this is just one piece of Robinhood slowly turning into “the Schwab for Gen Z.”

It’s also a pretty good snapshot of where we are as a society. Things that would’ve been considered a disgrace not that long ago are now fully mainstream, buttoned up, and sold as product features. Imagine explaining to Benjamin Franklin that Americans would one day gamble on football games, elections, and economic data… all inside the same app they use to save for retirement. Wild times.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Robinhood as mentioned in the article.