Shares of Robinhood Markets Inc.
Yet, the single biggest day of that run came when Bitcoin barely moved.
The stock closed 16.6% higher at $124.72 on Sept. 3, the strongest performer in the S&P 500 that session.
A cluster of analyst notes on prediction markets lifted the stock that day.
What may keep lifting it is something the market has spent far less time pricing.
BofA Securities analyst Craig Siegenthaler said in a note published Tuesday that agentic trading is splitting the US brokerage industry in two, favoring Robinhood and Interactive Brokers Group Inc.
Agentic trading lets a customer connect an outside artificial-intelligence model, such as Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT, to a separate ring-fenced brokerage account where the model can research, plan, and place trades.
The plumbing is the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, an open standard that lets AI models talk to outside services directly rather than through software written for human developers.
Anthropic donated it to the Agentic AI Foundation, and BofA counts more than 4,000 public MCP servers.
Robinhood opened its version to Gold subscribers on May 27. By the July 29 earnings call, it held $100 million of customer assets in those AI-linked accounts.
Interactive Brokers went live in July and still requires a human response before an order goes through.
Where The Money Actually Changes Hands
An agent trades more often, which lifts payment for order flow; the money market makers pay brokers to route customer orders. It borrows more on margin.
And it sweeps idle cash out of the broker's own account and into higher-yielding funds.
"Agentic trading adoption will alter their monetization effort - increasing trading velocity and margin loan utilization but also reduce cash sweep balances," Siegenthaler said.
That last part is where the note turns uncomfortable for Schwab.
Schwab pays 0.01% on swept cash as of August, against 3.35% at Robinhood Gold and 3.13% on Interactive Brokers Pro balances above $10,000. Roughly 57% of Schwab's forecast 2027 revenue comes from that spread.
Running early adoption assumptions through 2027 estimates, BofA models revenue up about 9% at Robinhood and 5% at Interactive Brokers, and down 5% at Schwab.
The Payoff Is Not This Quarter
Siegenthaler rates Robinhood a Buy with a $140 price objective, Interactive Brokers a Buy at $114 and Schwab an Underperform at $91.
BofA said it does not "view agentic trading as a major near-term earnings catalyst," describing it instead as a slow tailwind for the brokers that offer it.
Regulation is the other loose end.
No dedicated Securities and Exchange Commission or Financial Industry Regulatory Authority rule covers AI-driven trading, and the fiduciary standards that would govern it are still being written.
