By Andrew Welsch

Robinhood Markets is launching a prediction markets hub within its brokerage app, enabling investors to essentially make bets on the outcome of events from their phone.

The new hub will initially allow customers to trade event contracts predicting the target fed-funds rate in May and the outcome of the coming men's and women's college basketball tournaments.

Last year, Robinhood found success with event contracts based on the outcome of the presidential election; customers traded hundreds of millions of presidential event contracts.

The sports-related contracts will be Robinhood's second attempt at offering event contracts based on sporting events. In February, Robinhood introduced and quickly retracted Super Bowl events contracts after what it said was a formal request from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to "not permit customers to access" sports event contracts.

The company said the prediction markets hub and corresponding contracts will be available in the U.S. through KalshiEX, a CFTC-regulated exchange. "We have been in close contact with the CFTC over the past several weeks and look forward to continuing to work with them to promote innovation in the futures, derivatives and crypto markets," the company said.

The CFTC prohibits event contracts that reference terrorism, assassination, war, and other unlawful activities.

"We believe in the power of prediction markets and think they play an important role at the intersection of news, economics, politics, sports, and culture," said JB Mackenzie, vice president and general manager of futures and international at Robinhood. "We're excited to offer our customers a new way to participate in prediction markets and look forward to doing so in compliance with existing regulations."

Robinhood said that having a prediction markets hub will allow it to better serve customers interested in trading event contracts.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has been growing at a rapid clip, adding more products and services as it attempts to add new customers and more assets. For example, last year the brokerage firm unveiled a new desktop platform for active traders and began offering futures and index options. The company has plans for more products and services this year, including a robo-advisor. Robinhood has 26 million customers and nearly $190 billion in assets under custody.

Write to Andrew Welsch at andrew.welsch@barrons.com

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March 17, 2025 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)

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