Bullish retail investors and new offerings for users have propelled gains this year.
Retail investing has exploded in popularity since COVID, which has been a major boon for one of the most popular day-trader brokerages: Robinhood.
The company’s stock was up 151% in the first half of 2025, a move capped by a 13% surge on Monday alone.
Known as the favorite platform for everyday investors, Robinhood became well known during the GameStop short squeeze of 2021 and has retained its popularity since then, gaining popularity among new and aspiring traders.
After going public in 2021, Robinhood stock initially struggled to garner momentum, demonstrating minimal returns through most of 2022 and 2023. However, late in 2024, it started trending upward and since then, has made significant progress.
Now it ranks among the year’s breakout stocks, rewarding the traders who stocked up on shares during its stagnate period.
The company has “pulled a full ‘Robin Hood,’ stealing Wall Street’s skepticism and redistributing it,” said Michael Ashley Schulman, CIO of Running Point Capital Advisors.
Detailed below are three major reasons why the stock has been on such a tear in 2025.
Robinhood’s growing list of products has featured a further push into crypto.
The stock spiked 13% on Monday to a fresh record high after the company announced the launch of US private-stock and ETF tokens in the EU.
This marks a major step towards making privately held companies like OpenAI and SpaceX accessible to new investors via blockchain technology. Previously, access to these companies has been limited to insiders and extremely high net-worth individuals.
The tokenization itself works as follows: the company creates and issues crypto coins or digital tokens that are represented as equity shares. This is done through the use of smart contracts.
But there’s a catch: these tokens have their own prices, and they may not match or even be completely correlated with the underlying stock.
While Robinhood’s recent expansion was into Europe, US users aren’t able to access these features yet, and it remains unclear when it will be expanded to them.
Felix Hartmann, a managing partner at Hartmann Capital spoke to Business Insider about Robinhood’s decision and its positive implications.
“By adopting blockchain technology, Robinhood is horizontally expanding from a trading venue for Millennials and Gen Z into an end-to-end financial giant,” he states. “Betting on Robinhood is going long the convergence of fintech and Web3, executed by the team that culturally owns Millennial and Gen Z distribution.”
