Canadians get crypto only as AI agents and earnings bets launch south of the border
Robinhood Markets will open weekend trading in a curated list of US stocks and exchange-traded funds starting next year, subject to regulatory review, extending the round-the-clock weekday market the brokerage has run since 2023.
Every product unveiled on Tuesday at the company's third annual HOOD Summit in Houston, Texas, is for US customers.
Reuters reported that the weekend feature was launched in partnership with overnight trading infrastructure firm Bruce ATS.
About 10 months after launching 24-hour weekday trading, the company said as much as 25 percent of total daily trading volume on busy days came from outside traditional hours.
"Our focus this year is making Robinhood the best place for active traders by giving them the tools that are typically reserved for hedge funds, quants and a lot of big active trading firms," Abhishek Fatehpuria, vice president of product management at Robinhood, told Reuters in an interview.
Thin liquidity outside traditional hours could leave traders without optimal prices, according to Reuters, which also reported that Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange are pushing ahead with plans to extend trading hours.
Roughly 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts since an initial preview in May 2026, with agents now making nearly 30 million daily tool queries, Robinhood said in materials reported by Investing.com.
Customers can instruct agents to monitor markets and execute trades, including recurring strategies that run on pre-set conditions, Yahoo Finance reported, with models from Anthropic and OpenAI available at launch.
Trade-by-trade approval is switched on by default and can be turned off, letting an agent trade autonomously using only funds transferred into a separate agentic account.
Customers are responsible for their agents' trades, and Robinhood told Yahoo Finance it has not yet measured or compared the investment outcomes of agentic accounts against other strategies.
Wealth Professional has reported that seven in ten retail investors have used AI to help make investment decisions, with 59 percent of that group acting on the recommendations they received.
"I think very few people are going to go and put a large portion of their net worth in their agentic account and start trading on day one," Fatehpuria said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
Cboe Global Markets plans to launch binary contracts tied to company-specific key performance indicators in October, subject to regulatory approval, with Robinhood the first retail broker to offer them at launch.
Cboe will initially list contracts for 23 US-listed companies and will charge no fees through the end of 2026, subject to regulatory review.
The contracts will trade on Cboe's registered US securities exchange under SEC regulation, and Cboe has filed for temporary registration of its US clearinghouse, Cboe Clear US, LLC, as a Covered Clearing Agency.
"Earnings contracts give retail investors another tool to inform their strategies and offer an even more precise way to trade on anticipated company KPIs," said Steve Quirk, chief brokerage officer at Robinhood, in the Cboe announcement.
Eligible US users will also gain access to crypto perpetual contracts offering up to 10x leverage on Bitcoin and Ether, alongside positions in tokens such as Solana and Ripple, at a promotional transaction fee of 0.01 percent through the end of the year.
Extended options trading hours are scheduled for October, and 4x intraday margin for qualified accounts arrives next month, Investing.com reported.
The firm entered the Canadian market on June 1, closing its acquisition of Toronto-based WonderFi Technologies Inc. and bringing Bitbuy, Coinsquare and Bitcoin.ca under its brand.
The Canadian offering remains crypto-only, without the stock trading, prediction markets and other services available in the United States, according to The Logic, though Johann Kerbrat, senior vice-president and general manager of crypto and international, has said crypto is only the first step into Canada.
