Good Vibes: Robinhood CEO Says AI-Assisted, 24/7 Investing May Create ‘New Market’

One of the biggest tech themes of this year is vibe coding. People build applications by telling artificial intelligence tools in natural language to write code for them, allowing non-technical developers to prototype and build projects in the time it normally takes us to realize we’re too dumb for the job. Startups pioneering the practice have raised billions. SpaceX paid $60 billion for one of them, Cursor, in August.

Could those same vibes soon be applied to investing? Brokerage Robinhood announced a suite of new offerings this week and, on Wednesday, CEO Vlad Tenev explained how AI-powered trading tools could let users develop their own sophisticated, around-the-clock trading strategies that once relied on Wall Street’s brainiest software engineers.

Vibe Investing

Two of the new services demonstrate how competition among online financial services firms is increasingly entangled across traditional and emerging sectors. First, Robinhood will allow customers to trade select stocks and ETFs 24/7 starting next year. That marks a broadening of the limited trading Robinhood already allows for 24 hours on five days of the week and puts it in the thick of a race for sleepless customers that includes Charles Schwab, Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange.

Second, Robinhood will allow users to trade crypto perpetual futures contracts, which enable speculation on Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital assets without holding the underlying assets. 

And then there’s the big news: the AI-powered automated trading tools that let users build their own agents to automate trading and implement around-the-clock trading strategies. “A lot of people say, well, you’ll just be able to tell your Robinhood agent, go out and make me money,” CEO Vlad Tenev explained in a Wednesday interview with Yahoo Finance. “But, if everyone does that, that’s unlikely to be the best strategy.” Instead, he said a wholesale, vibe coding-like shift may be at hand:

• “It’ll create a new market, a new dynamic where traders can compete with one another over who can create the best strategy,” Tenev said. “And that strategy will be in English rather than in Python or R or C++, which is what it’s traditionally been in.”
• “AI democratized software engineering and made it so that anyone, even people without a formal computer science degree, can write extremely complicated code and anyone can make a website and deploy it,” he added. 

Cold Reception: Analysts were encouraged. Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank reiterated buy ratings on Robinhood stock, as well as their respective $150 and $134 price targets (compared with a $112 closing price on Wednesday). But, investors’ initial reaction was less enthusiastic: Robinhood shares fell 3.20% on Wednesday.