Maybe they’re still salty about losing their shirts during the 2021 Gamestop short squeeze… before Vlad flipped sides, shut off the buy button, and went from Robin Hood to Sheriff of Nottingham in under 48 hours. Whatever the reason, it’s hard not to feel like the folks over at S&P headquarters (yes, I know that’s not technically how it works, but roll with it) are holding a grudge. That said… this last earnings report? Might’ve been the one that finally breaks the curse. One that even the most spiteful index gatekeeper would have a hard time ignoring. But before I put on my tinfoil hat and start drawing red string between Vlad’s hairgel and the S&P’s secret grudge, let’s dive headfirst into the numbers.

For starters, Robinhood reported Q2 revenue of $989 million, up 45% YoY, and beat the Street’s $908M estimate like it owed them money. Net income (the thing Robinhood used to treat like a foreign concept) came in at $386 million, more than double last year’s haul (not bad for a company that used to measure success in “how many people bought Doge today?”). EPS came in at 42 cents, cruising past the 31-cent consensus. Which was a “beat so hard even Dan Dolev from Mizuho called it a Hulk Smash” moment (he definitely has call options riding on this thing).

So how’d they pull this off? Crypto, baby. But not in the way you think. While crypto trading revenue nearly doubled year-over-year to $160 million, it actually dropped 36% from last quarter (which is kinda confusing, considering Ethereum just rose from the dead and dragged half the altcoin zoo with it). But that dip tells us something important: Robinhood’s finally diversifying.

(Source: Bloomberg)

Transaction-based revenue held strong at $539 million, with options trading making up nearly half of that at $265 million (I guess we’re all just one bad CPI report away from going all-in on zero-day SPY calls). And they’re beefing up the high-margin stuff too. Net interest revenue came in at a surprising $357 million… aka the money they make from holding your cash and pretending it’s not yours. Meanwhile, Robinhood Gold subscriptions surged 76%, now clocking in at 3.5 million users paying extra for things like higher yields, faster deposits, and that premium feeling of not being on the free plan (aka the investing equivalent of flying Spirit vs. Delta).

Also worth noting: platform assets nearly doubled to $279 billion, and funded accounts jumped by 2.3 million, bringing the total to 26.5 million. Vlad even teased Robinhood Banking and a weirdly successful push into sports betting markets, which have already cleared $2 billion in contracts traded since launch. This is proof that Robinhood is becoming an actual fintech company… one that’s built to last.

And yet… despite the monster quarter, the subscriber growth, the diversification, the GAAP profits, and the stock ripping 169% year-to-date… the S&P 500 has spent the entire year saying, “Yeah… no.” Instead, they handed the golden ticket to fintech rival Block last month. Yes, that Block. The one still recovering from the Hindenburg napalm job that basically called their business model a crypto shell game with a Cash App logo superglued on top. Their crypto ops are so convoluted, Celsius is probably sitting in bankruptcy court thinking, “Damn, at least we weren’t that messy.”

Look, nobody’s saying Robinhood is perfect. The whole “tokenized shares of OpenAI and SpaceX” thing? Yeah, regulators in Europe weren’t thrilled. On top of that, it didn’t help their street cred when OpenAI issued a “we’ve never heard of this man” press release to try to save face. But come on… if Robinhood had a brick-and-mortar office in Greenwich, a board full of former Goldman execs, and a logo that looked like it belonged on a golf towel, it’d already be smoking a cigar with the big boys inside the S&P 500.

So what gives? Maybe it's Vlad’s face. Maybe it’s still the GME trauma. Or maybe S&P is just waiting to see if this quarter was a fluke before opening the gates. But at this point, Robinhood is up over 169% YTD, with more customers, more revenue, more diversification, and actual GAAP profits. It’s time. Let the man in. Or at least tell us what he did to piss you off so badly.

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