Robinhood Markets revealed a set of new investing tools and products for customers, including a more user-friendly way to use artificial intelligence to invest, extended trading hours, and event contracts tied to corporate earnings.

The moves come as Robinhood strives to win over more new customers and drum up additional business with existing clients. It has expanded its offerings beyond its free stock-trading app with the launch of banking services and financial advice, as well as tools and desktop applications that appeal to active traders.

Shares of Robinhood fell 1% early Wednesday morning and were trading hands at $114.59. The S&P 500 index was up 0.3%, but financial stocks were struggling. The Vanguard Financials ETF slid 0.25%.

Alex Markgraff, analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, says new Robinhood's new products may take time to ramp up, but can contribute to revenue, particularly agentic trading. "We're curious to see how customer behavior develops over time, but view agents as an accelerant to active trader volume with a low barrier to onboarding," Markgraff writes in a research note on Wednesday. He rates Robinhood shares Overweight and raised his price target to $140 from $130.

Robinhood unveiled the coming changes in Houston at Hood Summit, its annual conference for active traders. Previous Hood Summits have taken place in Miami and Las Vegas.

AI agents. In May, Robinhood launched an AI trading capability that permits customers to hook up their preferred AI chatbot to a dedicated agentic trading account. The bring-your-own-AI trading approach requires a little technical know-how. With the launch of Robinhood Agents, the company is bringing agentic trading into its app. The feature will roll out to customers starting this week, according to the company. Customers will be able to open a dedicated agentic account and choose an AI model from a lineup of models provided by several technology companies, including OpenAI. Robinhood also says usage on OpenAI GPT-6 Luna, one of the available models, will be free until the end of the year.

The company believes customers who aren't already using agentic trading will be attracted to Robinhood Agents' more approachable interface.

"One of the first barriers to using agentic trading today is you need some understanding to set it up," Gina Pasqua-Abeles, senior director of product at Robinhood, tells Barron's.

Robinhood says that since it launched agentic trading in May, more than 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts and AI agents use Robinhood's tools almost 30 million times a day.

The company says it has implemented certain safety features in Robinhood Agents. For example, AI agents can only access funds in a customer's dedicated agentic trading account. Customers can also choose to manually approve each trade (this is the default setting, the company says). In addition, Robinhood is making subscription-based data sources available that customers can access for their AI agents.

Robinhood's new offering comes as competitors have been launching their own AI capabilities for customers. On Tuesday, Webull said that it was expanding its Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities to enable customers to use AI to do research and analysis and prepare trades through Webull's cloud-based MCP server. That capability means users won't need specialized programming knowledge or software installed, the company said.

Weekend trading. Other new features unveiled at Robinhood's investor conference include expanded trading hours. Pending regulatory review, the company intends early next year to permit customers to trade a selection of U.S. equities around the clock, even on weekends.

The move would build on Robinhood's 24-hour market offering which launched in 2023 and enables customers to buy and sell certain stocks and exchange-traded funds from Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern through Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern.

"A lot of our customers have day jobs, they want to be able to do things in the evenings and on the weekends," Abhishek Fatehpuria, vice president of product management at Robinhood, tells Barron's.

The company also says that in the coming months, eligible U.S. customers will be able to trade perpetual futures inside the Robinhood app. Perpetual futures are futures contracts with no expiration date.

Earnings contracts. Robinhood is also launching earnings contracts in its prediction markets offering, which enables customers to speculate on the outcome of events via binary yes/no contracts. Most trading volumes on prediction markets are in sports-related event contracts. For example, customers can wager on whether the Los Angeles Dodgers will win the World Series.

Robinhood says the new earnings contracts, which are made available through Cboe Global Markets, will require customers to have options approval. Eligible customers will be able to buy and sell contracts based on company-specific metrics such as whether a company beat earnings estimates, hit a revenue target, or crossed a key financial milestone.

Robinhood's prediction markets offering has become a substantial moneymaker for the company and is one of 13 business lines that generate $100 million or more in annualized revenue.