Traders are flooding markets with risky bets. Robinhood’s CEO is their cult hero.

Brokerage co-founded by Vlad Tenev makes exotic investments available to ordinary investors, seeing aggressive traders as key to company’s success

- Jannah Erin Lang

Vlad Tenev, chief executive officer and co-founder of Robinhood.

(REUTERS)

The chief executive of Robinhood Markets took the stage at the online brokerage’s annual summit in Las Vegas this fall decked out in a race-car driver's jumpsuit and customized Nikes.

Vlad Tenev told the hundreds of cheering traders in the audience that they had chosen “one of the most intense lifestyles out there.” He compared trading to driving a race car. “A finely tuned machine can make all the difference,” he said, “and that's the role we feel Robinhood plays for our active investors.”

Risk-taking is back for individual investors, and few people have done more to stoke those spirits than the 38-year-old Tenev. Robinhood's trading app makes it easy not just to buy and sell ordinary stocks, but to invest in options, cryptocurrencies and other exotic financial products, even to make sports bets and play the prediction markets.

The company’s critics liken the environment to a casino, but its fans credit Robinhood with democratizing the lucrative world of sophisticated investments.

“He's almost building a cult,” said Aaron Cook, a 28-year-old plumber who was in the audience in Las Vegas. Cook said he had used his profits from trading stocks, options and memecoins to buy a Jeep Wrangler and a $60,000 home.

A host of new products have entered retail investment markets in recent years and worked their way into the mainstream. Investors are wagering on the price of bitcoin and piling into ultrarisky types of, options, such as the “zero-day” variety that expire rapidly and require perfect timing. They are buying futures contracts tied to all sorts of events, betting on whether a Taylor Swift album will top the Spotify charts or whether the Green Bay Packers will beat the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day.