What do you make of the stock of Robinhood Markets, the online brokerage platform of choice for younger investors with a stock that's kind of joined at the hip with Bitcoin? It shot up over 9% today thanks to Bitcoin rally and up nearly 90% from its March lows. But it's still not back up to where it was trading in its highs in January. Still, there's a lot going on at Robinhood. Earlier this week, when I was out in Silicon Valley, I got to speak with Vlad Tenev, the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Robinhood Markets, at their headquarters in Menlo Park. Take a look.
But it's been a remarkable time. You have kind of captured what people want in different instruments. You're bringing them all. I wanted to ask you how much of what you do is literally because people want it as opposed to necessarily what you guys sit back in a room and offer.
I think that it's a good mix of both. I think there's a lot of things where, you know, obviously our customers are asking us for more trading assets, international stocks and things of that nature. And we have an endless roadmap from customers. But there's also things where we have an opinion and a point of view. And really, nobody's asking us for that specific thing, but we think that's where the industry is going to go, that we believe we can build bigger, better products. So, for example, when you look at tokenization and prediction markets, that was just, you know, we had a view of what we wanted the product to be. And we built that.
There is one. You know, Robinhood is working on a lot of stuff, right? We just, as we were talking, went through a long list of different products, credit cards, Trump accounts, tokenization, you know, US equities. And the way I think about it is there's really one idea that's core to everything and that's ownership. We believe that ownership is essential, not just because if people are owners, they have skin in the game, they can benefit financially, but also a society where more people own high quality financial assets is inherently a more stable society. And that's kind of underlying everything that we do.
But how do you be sure that that isn't too much gambling? I know that you and I have talked for multiple years. We don't want to encourage gambling. We can't stop it. We want to encourage investing. At what point do you say maybe some of these instruments aren't right for our people?
Yeah. And that's a question that we think about a lot. The thing is, ownership doesn't work without healthy markets. And markets don't work without traders. So you need traders. Robinhood doesn't work without traders either. If you think about active traders as a part of our business, it's really the engine room and the foundation of our business. So the products that we build to serve traders allow us to acquire customers and get them into products that, you know, are perhaps a little bit less sexy, but long term, more important.
I'll give you an example. There's actually one product that we incentivize at Robinhood. You probably wouldn't guess what it was.
We incentivize retirement. So if you open up a retirement account at Robinhood and you're a Gold member, you get a 3% contribution match, which means every $100 you contribute, we match out of our corporate balance sheet 3%. And, you know, our view in that was a lot of people now have gone away from the traditional lifelong employment model where you're working at a company, you know, from 18 years old to retirement. And so people are moving around. The accounts are much more portable, and there's less reliance on the conventional 401k.
So we wanted to build a product for that. And that's what we incentivize. But what we've also found is that, you know, retirement ads aren't the best at pulling people in. So we actually get customers from a wide variety of different means, including prediction markets, stock trading, crypto. And once they come into Robinhood, we've actually seen that at relatively high rates, they're adopting all of our products and opening up retirement accounts and building a comprehensive financial relationship.
I'll tell you what you meant, because every time I say, okay, they're doing too much, I think it's too close. Prediction may be too much gambling. I then look at a credit card that you do 3%, and that's better than so many credit cards. I look at what you're doing for retirement. I said, well, that's pretty good. So this is why I start with this, because I think you are in touch with the zeitgeist of all the people, more people than any other firm who are going to get the trillions of dollars from the generational hand-off of baby boomers to people who are in Gen Z, and that you have what they want, although they aren't even sure what they want. You offer the vast panoply and the other guys don't, which is what I'm leading to, is why you're so darn successful.
Well, we appreciate that. I think there's a lot more to do. I think that we look at all the products that we could offer, that we are offering. I still think there's a lot more to do. I mean, you mentioned it yourself. Over 100 trillion in wealth is passing from older generations to younger. And, you know, when we look at what that means, that's an accelerating and very large asset transfer over the next several decades.
And, you know, these customers, their needs evolve. So they start out with relatively simple needs. Like, you know, they want a place to buy stocks. Maybe they'll have an IRA. Over time, they'll get more complex. They start asking for trusts, which we now offer different types of trusts. They want estate planning. They want private wealth management, private banking. And our challenge, and I think this is like an exciting one for me personally, is how can we offer these high net worth quality products to the mass market at very low prices? And I think that's an exciting challenge for me because as an engineer and a technologist, you can actually push pretty hard by using technology.
You used to be that you had to go into a building with big columns and talk to expensive people wearing suits in order to get some of these services. They wouldn't even talk to you if you have less than $250,000 with their institution. And, you know, with technology, we can make the front door much bigger and open it up to tens of millions.
But how do you know? I mean, I've always felt that you were democratizing finance, which is when we first had you on long before you actually really just when you were an app we had you on, you were definitely about democratizing finance or manufacturing more things to trade, which I don't know whether you, I think is actually point blank a good thing.
