Robinhood's Record Quarter Got a 12% Growth Rate and a 24% Drawdown

Records on the top line, a decelerating slope underneath, and a deposit headline half-filled by a Dell family gift

HOOD · Earnings Call · 2026-10-27

The tape disagreed with the press release

Robinhood printed the best top line in its history on 2026-10-27 — a record $1.4 billion of revenue, a record $808 million of adjusted EBITDA at a 57% margin — and the stock sits roughly 24% below its September 3 peak of $124.72 and 38% below the October 2025 high of $152.46. The multiple has been de-rating for a year even as the revenue line kept setting records: 18.3x revenue, down from a 30.6x peak. That gap is the story. The quarter was good. The delta was not. Because the record is simultaneously a deceleration. Q2 2026 revenue of $1,308 million grew 32% year over year; this quarter's $1.4 billion grew 12%. Shiv Verma framed it forward: “revenues were up 12% to a record $1.4 billion” — Shiv Verma, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-27. A 20-point deceleration in the growth rate is the sort of thing that compresses a multiple no matter how many records the press release contains — and with price to net income still at 43.5x, the margin for error has narrowed sharply.

The $6 billion asterisk

Vlad Tenev led with deposits: “we have already exceeded our annual goal of 20% net deposit growth” — Vladimir Tenev, Chairman · 2026-10-27 — with two months still to go. Then the detail that reframes the headline:

October net deposits are over $13 billion in the month, great to see, and that includes $6 billion of the Dell Family Gift to Trump accounts.
Shiv Verma, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-27

Nearly half of the single best deposit month in company history is one philanthropic transfer into Trump accounts — a program that had 7 million child sign-ups and roughly $1.5 billion of contributions as of July, and now sits at auto-enrollment with 25 million children pre-funded at $250 by the Dell Foundation. It is an extraordinary franchise-building asset and a genuinely durable source of future net funded accounts. It is also not organic wallet-share growth, and the fourth quarter will be compared against a number that included it. The other soft edge is engagement. Monthly actives have been parked in a 13–14 million band for a year, and when Adam Fresh asked about it, Shiv Verma did not spin: “the honest answer is we don't goal on it” — Shiv Verma, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-27. Compare that with July, when the same CFO celebrated a step-change in top-of-funnel: “The million funded customers the most we have added in the quarter, nearly 5 years since the IPO” — Shiv Kumar Verma, CFO · 2026-07-29. Q3 was back to "similar to Q1," with the dial being turned toward 2027 product launches. And then there is a small but real inconsistency: Tenev's prepared remarks put Gold at “Robinhood Gold reached 5 million subscribers” — Vladimir Tenev, Chairman · 2026-10-27, while Verma, minutes later, described “Gold subscribers reached a new all-time high of over 4 million subs” — Shiv Verma, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-27. Either a milestone was crossed mid-deck or one of the two is a rounding artifact. With an 18% attach rate against the base and 40% among new joiners, this is the cleanest read the market has on multiproduct adoption — a four-versus-five-million gap in the same call is worth flagging rather than smoothing.

Where the pricing went

Take rates came in light, and management was unusually specific about why. On crypto, it was not churn or mix — it was their own best new product:

On crypto, the main driver was our Robinhood Earn, our stablecoin product... because it's stablecoin, we monetize it less than the normal platform.
Shiv Verma, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-27

Earn now holds over $500 million of assets and is cannibalizing the fee line by design — the mirror image of the broader stablecoin adoption wave that is compressing monetization across the crypto complex. Event contracts took a pricing change — dynamic pricing, plus a Gold discount — that the company says was revenue-neutral while customers paid less at the wings; and on both equities and options, “spreads are a little bit tighter” — Shiv Verma, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-27 into October. Even the Robinhood Chain — the quarter's genuine surprise, $100 billion of DEX volume, more than $50 million of gross chain fees, roughly half shared with Arbitrum — was deliberately held back from the cylinder count: “We didn't call it a cylinder just yet. We want to give it more time to bake.” — Shiv Verma, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-27

What actually shipped, and the reversal no one priced

Measured against its own history, this quarter's genuinely new items are specific. Perpetual futures went live in the US — true perps, 15-minute settlement, powered by Bitstamp — after Patrick Moley pushed management on the delay in July and got “I just do not like giving timelines at earnings, that is what our events are for” — Vladimir Tenev, Chairman and CEO · 2026-07-29. In three months they shipped it. Agentic trading moved in-app with $250 million already sitting in agentic accounts, up from roughly 100,000 accounts and much smaller balances in July; note that "agentic" is now consensus wallpaper across the last five days of reporting — communications, networking, ad-tech, exchanges — so Robinhood's moat is agentic trading, not agentic anything. Non-sports prediction markets hit 30% of event contracts from 15% a quarter earlier — a direct answer to the "sports is the whole thing" critique Tenev met in February with “a good chunk of it is sports” — Vladimir Tenev, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) · 2025-07-31. And then the quietly important reversal. A year ago the room asked how the business would survive falling rates; on this call, Verma priced a hike as a gift — “for every 25 basis point hike or decline, it's about a 1.5% change to revenue” — Shiv Verma, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-27, roughly $100 million on $40 billion of rate-sensitive assets. Tenev, dryly: “every couple of years it's like the question reverses” — Vladimir Tenev, Chairman · 2026-10-27. That is what a rate environment hedge actually looks like in practice — trading products and net interest income pulling in opposite directions — and it is why the +12% deserves a charitable read: NIM carried the quarter while transaction growth cooled.

Capital return as the tell

With the stock in a 24% drawdown and the buyback running at $414 million in Q2, up 234% year over year, February's commitment — “during periods of market volatility, it's a really great time to lean into that program” — Shiv Verma, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-02-10 — is now live and testable. Watch the cash line too: free cash flow less stock comp has swung from $1.1 billion to -$1.65 billion to $615 million across six quarters, which explains why a new "adjusted EPS" of $0.60 was introduced alongside GAAP's $0.51 — a construct that conveniently strips the mark-to-market noise from Robinhood Ventures, but still includes stock comp. The synthesis: Robinhood is compounding — $68 billion of year-to-date deposits, 14 businesses over $100 million annualized, real product velocity in perps, agentic and chain, and a peer payments feature demoed live that treats Zelle as legacy technology. But the tape has stopped paying for ambition and started paying for demonstrated incremental revenue. The next quarter has to answer three questions the press release did not: does the deposit engine work without the Dell gift, does Robinhood Earn keep diluting take rate while it grows, and does anything move monthly actives off 14 million.