Bloomberg Surveillance Sep 21, 2026
With Steph Guild, Chief Investment Officer of Robinhood
Net buying on Robinhood cooled off in July. Since the market pullback, customers have been back — and they have come back into single stocks rather than ETFs.
The retail investor is usually caricatured as the one who cannot bring themselves to sell. Steph Guild's read of her own platform is the reverse: taking a profit is the thing her customers find easy.
"generally speaking, behaviorally, our customers don't have a problem taking profits."
Guild is Robinhood's chief investment officer and runs Robinhood Strategies, the firm's managed-portfolio business, which she says has more than 350,000 customers and over $2 billion in assets. She writes the portfolio notes those clients get herself.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 6 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Net buying cooled in July and came back after the pullback, into single stocks rather than ETFs
The AI trade on the platform is a spread trade between hyperscalers and picks-and-shovels names, and it started changing in the last week
Customers used prediction markets to trade crypto while the price itself was going nowhere
Meta was sold to buy Oracle after a good run; the most-bought names are Nvidia and Oracle, which is not the same list as the most active
Bitcoin at 85,000 broke the range Guild says she had been watching it in
Robinhood Strategies puts single stocks in managed portfolios, caps Gold members' fees at $250 a year, and runs a quantitative process with a human and AI overlay
1. Back In After July
Tom Keene opened by asking what people on the platform are buying and selling. Guild's answer started with a pause in activity and its end.
Where the flow went
in July, we saw them sort of net buying cool off. But since that kind of pullback in the markets, they've been back at it much more in the single stock base, for example, than the ETF space.
Steph Guild
She also put a boundary around how the company is read from the outside. Robinhood's share price often correlates with bitcoin, and she does not accept that as a description of the business.
The correlation is not the company
But that's not our full business at all. We have a pretty diversified business.
Steph Guild
2. Trading the AI Split
The specific shape of the AI trade on the platform is not a directional bet on the theme. It is a bet on which half of it works.
Hyperscalers against picks and shovels
what we've been seeing customers do is definitely more back in the AI trade, just trading the differences between hyperscalers and picks and shovel stocks, which you're starting to see change a lot in the last week or so.
Steph Guild
3. Prediction Market Trades
The part of the answer that had nothing to do with equities was about what customers did with crypto while crypto was flat.
A workaround for a market that would not move
they were using prediction markets to trade the small changes in prices.
Steph Guild
The trade she described is a question rather than a position: where will the price be, or will it be above a certain level. Her expectation is that the behavior fades now that the underlying has started moving again.
Why she thinks it stops
And I think that's probably going to start changing now that you've seen a pop in crypto and perhaps breaking out a little.
Steph Guild
4. Selling Meta for Oracle
Asked whether customers will let go of their AI high-flyers or keep adding, Guild answered with the platform's behavioral pattern rather than a position.
The reputation is wrong on this one
I like generally speaking, behaviorally, our customers don't have a problem taking profits.
Steph Guild
The specific rotation
you definitely see like meta is one of the things that, you know, they've sold recently. Cause that's actually had a pretty good run going back into something like an Oracle.
Steph Guild
She was careful that this is a platform-level read and not a view on individual accounts.
The behavior in one line
they definitely are happy to take a profit and move on to something that's maybe looking cheaper.
Steph Guild
The desk then put its own data at her: the most active stocks are Micron and SanDisk, the two best performers in the first half of the year for the S&P, both well off their June peaks and therefore cheaper on earnings. Guild pushed back on the inference.
Active is not the same as bought
And I wouldn't equate buying with activity.
Steph Guild
What the buying list actually looks like
the most bought, for example, has been more Nvidia and Oracle.
Steph Guild
The desk's observation on that was that Nvidia has underperformed its peers badly this year by its own standards, which makes customers going back into it the more interesting half of the list.
5. Bitcoin Breaks Its Range
Keene raised the crypto price and asked whether Robinhood's customers chase momentum.
The level he put to her
We're at 85,000 on Bitcoin.
Bloomberg Surveillance
Guild's answer was that crypto moves in seasonal spells and that attention followed the pop a couple of weeks earlier. She also gave her own test for it.
What she was waiting to see
I personally have been watching it saying, you know, I want to see if it can actually break out of the kind of range that it's been in.
Steph Guild
Her read is that it did that over the Friday and the weekend before the interview, and that people are certainly paying attention now.
6. Inside Robinhood Strategies
The last question was about Robinhood Strategies, the firm's digital advisory product. Guild described it as a different part of the platform, built for customers whose lives leave them less time to trade.
What it is
we've created a set of portfolios that you can invest in that will do the investing for you.
Steph Guild
The differentiation she claims is in what goes into the portfolio.
Not a basket of ETFs
we actually have single stocks in the portfolios versus a lot of other, you know, robos out there that just kind of buy a group of ETFs.
Steph Guild
And a human on the other end of it
We leave you messages. About what's happening in your portfolio directly from me and my team.
Steph Guild
Fees are capped: a Gold member pays no more than $250 a year for the service. The rationale for holding single names at all is a view about the regime.
Why the product is built this way
we have a general like philosophy that we think the markets have substantially changed kind of post 2022 and rates started going up.
Steph Guild
Onboarding is a short questionnaire to place a customer in the right risk-return profile, and the process underneath is a hybrid.
The process, in her description
we start with a quantitative investment process that kind of keeps our emotion out of it
Steph Guild
Then the people and the models
And then we have an overlay from our team and we use artificial intelligence quite a bit to help support our investment research.
Steph Guild
And the framework it is built on
we have an investment process that's grounded in behavioral finance, which is very different, I'd say than a lot of other places too.
Steph Guild
Scale and personalization are the trade-off she acknowledged: the business needs scale, and the account is still adjustable by the customer.
What a customer can change
You can restrict stocks. You can change the risk return profile of your portfolio directly.
Steph Guild
Bonus Insights
She reads the platform, not the account
Asked whether customers hold on to a piece of a winner and trade around it, Guild said the firm looks across the platform rather than at individual positions — which is what makes the most-bought list a different object from the most-active one.
The size of the managed business
Robinhood Strategies has over 350,000 customers and over $2 billion in assets on her figures, which is the scale she says lets the firm keep the fee capped while still customizing accounts.
Crypto has seasons
Her framing of the attention cycle is that crypto goes through seasonal spells: a pop happens, and only then do people start paying attention — which is the opposite order from the one the prediction-market trade implies.
Guild's bottom line is that the retail investor on her platform is an active profit-taker rotating between AI names rather than a buy-and-hold holder, and that the managed side of the business is being built on the assumption that the post-2022 rate regime requires holding individual companies, not just funds.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Robinhood (Her firm; she distinguishes the diversified business from the share price's correlation with bitcoin)
Robinhood Strategies (The managed-portfolio product: single stocks alongside ETFs, fees capped at $250 a year for Gold members, 350,000+ customers and over $2B in assets)
Oracle and Meta (The rotation she named — customers selling Meta after a good run and going into Oracle)
Nvidia (Alongside Oracle, one of the two most-bought names, despite what the desk called tremendous underperformance against its peers this year)
Micron and SanDisk (The most active names on the platform, and the two best first-half performers in the S&P 500 on the desk's figures)
Bitcoin (At 85,000 on the morning of the interview, and through the range Guild says she had been watching)
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