HOOD — Q2 2026 Financial Report Analysis

Prediction markets replaced crypto as Robinhood's growth engine

Robinhood's June 2026 quarter looks, at the headline, like a clean acceleration: total net revenues rose 32% to $1,308 million and diluted earnings per share — the company's profit divided across all shares, including those that could be created by stock awards and convertible debt — climbed 48% to $0.62. The composition matters more than the headline. Almost the entire revenue gain came from two places the company barely earned anything from a year ago, event contracts and margin lending, while its crypto business shrank by more than a third. Operating costs grew slightly faster than revenue, so the underlying operating margin actually slipped, and roughly $129 million of one-time investment gains did a meaningful part of the work on the bottom line.

The numbers

"Operating margin" here is the share of revenue left after all operating costs but before investment gains and tax. "Funded Customers" are people with a funded account who had a positive balance or traded in the last 45 days; "Total Platform Assets" is everything customers hold on the platform (stocks, options, crypto, cash) plus assets managed by advisers on Robinhood's TradePMR platform. ARPU is annualized revenue divided by average Funded Customers.

Where the $237 million of extra trading revenue came from

Transaction-based revenue is what Robinhood earns from routing customer orders — market makers pay for that order flow — plus fees on prediction-market contracts. The filing breaks the $237 million increase down precisely: +$146 million from event contracts, +$77 million from options, +$63 million from equities, offset by −$60 million from cryptocurrencies.

Event contracts — prediction-market bets on real-world outcomes — went from a rounding error to 12% of the company's total revenue in four quarters. Management attributes this to "an acceleration in our prediction markets business, reflecting higher trading activity compared to the same period in 2025 when the offering was still in its early stage." That is a genuine new revenue line, but it is also the single largest concentration risk in the quarter: 12% of revenue now sits in a product whose regulatory treatment is still being contested and which has no multi-year track record of customer retention through a quiet news cycle.

Options revenue grew on volume, not price. Contracts traded per trader rose 43%, but revenue rose only 29% because rebate rates fell — different stock tickers pay Robinhood different per-contract rates, and the mix shifted toward lower-paying ones. Equities worked the other way: notional trading volume per trader rose 56%, users placing equity trades rose 13%, and rebate rates improved on ticker mix, which is why equities revenue nearly doubled on a smaller volume gain than options.

Crypto is the problem line. Revenue fell 38% on three compounding negatives the filing names: lower rebate rates from crypto market makers, 16% fewer users placing crypto trades, and 20% lower average notional volume per trader. Only the Bitstamp acquisition partially cushioned it. The balance sheet confirms it isn't a rate-mix artifact — customer crypto held in custody fell to $26.3 billion from $41.1 billion a year earlier, a 36% decline, and dropped from $38.2 billion at December 31, 2025. Crypto has gone from 16% of Robinhood's revenue to 8% in a year. For the six-month view the damage is larger: crypto revenue of $234 million versus $412 million, down 43%.

Net interest revenue: margin lending up, everything rate-sensitive down

Net interest revenue — what Robinhood earns lending money and holding cash, minus what it pays out — rose only 9% to $389 million, and the internal mix is stark:

• Margin interest $215M, up 89% (loans to customers who borrow to buy securities). Customer receivables, mostly margin balances, more than doubled to $21.6 billion from $9.3 billion.
• Credit card, net $40M, up 208%, as the Gold Card book scaled.
• Securities lending $10M, down 81% — Robinhood lends out customer shares; the filing blames "a relatively unfavorable average rate on higher stock loan balances," meaning bigger balances earning much less per dollar.
• Cash Sweep $41M (−32%), interest on corporate cash $31M (−33%), segregated cash $60M (−22%) — all three fell on "a lower short-term interest rate environment."

This is the clearest read-through in the filing for anyone modelling 2027: management states outright that "any potential future rate cuts by the Federal Reserve will negatively impact our net interest revenues and adversely affect our customers' returns on cash deposits." Roughly $132 million of this quarter's interest revenue (sweep, corporate cash, segregated cash) moves with short-term rates and is already shrinking. The offset is margin lending, which is growing fast but is itself pro-cyclical — margin balances contract when markets fall, exactly when trading rebates also weaken.

Costs, one-offs, and why net income grew faster than revenue

Operating expenses rose 33.5% to $734 million, marginally faster than revenue, which is why operating margin ticked down to 43.9% from 44.4%. The drivers are specific rather than general inflation:

• General and administrative $199M, up 51% — the largest single cost increase, from +$29 million of compensation including stock-based compensation tied to "the modification of executive awards related to senior leadership transitions," +$22 million of other G&A, and +$7 million of legal expense and reserves.
• Provision for credit losses $56M, up 100% — almost entirely the credit card book (+$32 million), from higher purchased receivables rather than worse credit; reserve rates actually fell on improved recoveries. Brokerage-related credit losses fell $4 million on less fraud.
• Operations $57M, up 97% — including $13 million of customer-experience cost to support Trump Accounts.
• Technology and development $256M, up 20% — acquisitions and new product launches.
• Marketing $104M, up 5% — prediction-market and credit-card spend, offset by lower brand campaigns.

On June 16, 2026 Robinhood cut about 10% of full-time staff, taking a $23 million restructuring charge in the quarter. That cost is inside the numbers above; the savings are not yet.

The bigger swing sits below the operating line. Other income, net was $135 million versus $3 million a year ago, of which $106 million is a non-cash gain from deconsolidating Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI) — Robinhood sold part of its stake on June 25, lost control, and had to re-mark its remaining interest, now carried at $437 million, to fair value — plus $23 million of gains on equity securities mostly held by RVI. Management itself strips both out of Adjusted EBITDA as not indicative of ongoing results.

Strip them out and the picture is more sober: pre-tax income of roughly $580 million rather than the reported $709 million, up about 31% year over year, essentially in line with revenue growth rather than the reported 60% pre-tax jump. Working the other direction, the effective tax rate rose to 19.2% from 12.7% — the filing attributes this to business growth and a smaller benefit from stock compensation — which is what pulls reported net income growth back to 45%.

Takeaway: Robinhood replaced a shrinking crypto business with prediction markets and margin lending in a single year, and the swap has so far been revenue-accretive but not margin-accretive — operating margin fell slightly, and roughly $129 million of one-off investment gains, not operations, accounts for most of the gap between 32% revenue growth and 48% EPS growth. The durability question for 2027 is whether event contracts hold up as a 12%-of-revenue line and whether margin interest can keep outrunning the rate-sensitive interest income that management has already flagged as falling.

Balance sheet and capital returns

Robinhood ended the quarter with $5.4 billion of cash and cash equivalents plus $155 million of stablecoin. On June 25 it issued $2.2 billion of 0.00% convertible senior notes due October 2029 — no regular interest, an effective rate of 0.43% after issuance costs — and immediately used about $290 million of the proceeds to buy back 2.7 million shares at $105.71. Separately, it repurchased 1.7 million shares for $124 million in the quarter under the $1.5 billion program authorized in March 2026, which management expects to run roughly three years.

The combined effect is visible in the share count: diluted weighted-average shares were 912 million versus 909 million a year earlier, essentially flat despite $105 million of quarterly stock-based compensation. That is the buybacks doing their job, though the convertible notes create future dilution if the stock converts.

Operating cash flow for the first half was $2,758 million against $4,151 million a year earlier. For a broker this figure is dominated by swings in customer cash and receivables rather than profitability — the doubling of the margin book alone consumes cash on this line — so the decline is not a deterioration in earnings quality.

Half-year view and what to watch

For the six months, total net revenues were $2,375 million (+24%), net income attributable to Robinhood $911 million (+26%), and diluted EPS $1.00 versus $0.79. Adjusted EBITDA was $1,275 million (+25%). The half-year growth rate is notably slower than the quarter's, because Q1 2025 was an unusually strong crypto quarter — the year-over-year crypto decline is steeper on a six-month basis (−43%) than on a quarterly one (−38%).

Robinhood gives no formal revenue or earnings guidance in the 10-Q. The forward-looking statements it does make are directional: future Fed rate cuts will hurt net interest revenue, and the SEC's tick-size, access-fee and odd-lot quoting changes "could lead to a decrease in the PFOF earned from such orders" — payment for order flow being the core of the equities and options revenue lines, and a change the company notes would hit it harder than competitors who rely on it less.

Our own read: the quality of this quarter rests on three things that are all still unproven over a full cycle. Event contracts went from $10 million to $156 million in a year, which is exactly the kind of line that can halve as fast as it grew. Customer growth is the slowest-moving part of the story — Funded Customers rose 7% while revenue per customer rose 24%, so this is a monetization quarter, not an acquisition quarter, and the 0.9 million new customers were partly offset by 0.4 million churned. And the 10% workforce cut, plus the executive-award modifications behind the G&A jump, suggest management is actively resetting the cost base rather than simply growing into it. The structural positive is Gold: 4.84 million subscribers, up 39%, generating $54 million of highly predictable subscription revenue and anchoring the credit card and margin businesses that produced the quarter's most durable-looking growth.