Robinhood Markets, Inc. Q3 FY2024 Earnings Call

Thank you for standing by. My name is Catherine and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Robinhood Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Thank you. I will now like to turn the call over to Chris Koegel, Vice President of Corporate, FP&A and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Catherine, and thank you to everyone for joining Robinhood's Q3 earnings call. With us today are CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev and CFO Jason Warnick. Before getting started, I want to remind you that today's call will contain forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from our expectations, and we have no duty to provide updates unless legally required. Potential risk factors that could cause differences, including regulatory developments that we continue to monitor, are described in the press release we issued today, the earnings presentation, and our SEC filings, all of which can be found at investors.robinhood.com. Today's discussion will also include non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the GAAP measures we consider most comparable can be found in the earnings presentation. With that, let me turn it over to Vlad.

Thanks, Chris. Hi, everyone. Let me start by reiterating Robinhood's three areas of focus. Number one, winning the active trader market. Number two, increasing wallet share with our customers. And number three, expanding internationally. In Q3, we continue to make progress on all of these fronts. In fact, our results after the first three quarters of the year have already broken through a number of full-year records. We have another quarter in front of us to take these results even higher. Just to share a few examples. First, Q3 net deposits were over $10 billion for the third straight quarter as we continue to increase wallet share. This brings our year-to-date total to $34 billion, above our 2020 record of $31 billion, and takes our customer assets under custody to a record high of $152 billion. Second, Q3 options contracts were up 47% year-over-year to a new record as we keep winning with active traders. This brings our year-to-date total to 1.2 billion contracts, edging out our full-year high from 2021. And third, Q3 was another strong financial quarter with our second highest revenues ever. Revenues grew 36% year-over-year, adjusted EBITDA increased 96% from a year ago. Looking year-to-date, revenues of nearly $2 billion have already broken last year's record of $1.9 billion, and GAAP diluted EPS of $0.55 is multiples of any prior year. It’s energizing to see our business performing well like this, but we're even more excited about our product roadmap. A key part of increasing wallet share with customers is growing Robinhood Gold subscriptions, which hit an all-time high of 2.2 million in Q3. One of the most exciting parts of the Gold program is our Robinhood Gold card. When I've talked to Robinhood customers recently, the Gold card almost always comes up. If someone has it, they love it; if they don't have it, they want to know when they are going to get it. I hear you, and we're working hard to increase the rollout, but we're also being patient and carefully studying customer behavior as we grow so that we manage credit risk to profitably scale over time. While it's still early, I wanted to share some emerging data from our 100,000 Gold card customers. First, customers love the Gold card. App store ratings continue to be five out of five with over 10,000 five-star reviews. Customers tell us they love the metal card, the digital app, and of course, the 3% rewards. Second, the early customer behavior is in line with our expectations. It looks like the Gold card is top of wallet for most customers, and early data shows that we're retaining approximately 95% of Gold card customers following their first transaction. We're also starting to see customer spending grow and loan balances revolve as expected. Third, Gold card customers are also contributing meaningfully higher net deposits versus similar customers. It's great to see the early additional benefits to the platform. All in all, while it's still quite early, we're further increasing confidence that we can scale the Gold card significantly over time. Now, let me turn it over to Jason to review our financial results, and then I'll offer some additional thoughts.

Thanks, Vlad, and thanks everyone for joining us today. In Q3, we had another strong quarter, growing revenues 36% and driving 77% incremental adjusted EBITDA margins versus a year ago. Q3 business results also set a number of new highs, including assets under custody, options contracts, cash suite balances, and retirement AUC, as well as multi-year highs for equity volumes and margin balances. As we enter 2024 focused on driving another year of profitable growth, we're excited that we've already broken records for full-year revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and earnings per share. Looking at the progress we made in Q3 versus a year ago, assets under custody grew 76% to a record $152 billion. Net deposits were over $10 billion for the third straight quarter and $39 billion over the past year. This translates to annualized net deposit growth rates of 29% in Q3 and 45% over the past year. Total net revenues grew 36% to $637 million. Adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled to $268 million. Adjusted EBITDA margins expanded by 13 points to 42%, and net income grew to $150 million or $0.17 per share. This was reduced by one cent for a regulatory accrual in the quarter. We're pleased with these results, marking our fourth straight quarter of GAAP profitability and ninth straight quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. Now let's look more closely at Q3 revenues which increased year-over-year across all three categories. Transaction-based revenues grew 72% as we drove higher volumes and market share gains across all trading products. It was great to see option, equity, and crypto volumes up 47%, 65%, and over 100% from a year ago respectively. Net interest revenues increased 9% as we grew interest earning assets and securities lending activity improved. This included customers growing their cash suite balances 80% year-over-year and margin balances building to a two-year high. Lastly, other revenues grew by 42% as we added over 850,000 gold subscribers in the past year to reach a record 2.2 million subscribers and record annualized recurring gold subscription revenue of over $110 million. I'd also note that our Q3 revenues include the impact of contra revenues from amortizing matches on customer deposits and transfers. Q3 contra revenues were $27 million, up $14 million sequentially, mostly driven by the 1% gold deposit boost. We expect contra revenues to grow sequentially by a similar amount in Q4 and then grow much slower in 2025. To provide more context, customers love the matches we provide on asset transfers and IRA contributions, and we're seeing great payback periods on these matches. At the same time, the 1% gold deposit boost has not driven as much incremental customer activity as our other promotions. So, we've decided to wind it down in November to focus on offers that resonate more with customers. For example, we doubled down recently for our hood week promotion by offering a range of matches on asset transfers, leading to $2 billion of transfers in from brokerage incumbents that averaged over $130,000 per customer in just two weeks. Reflecting on our revenue this year, it feels good that our last three quarters are the three highest in company history. Turning to Q3 expenses, we had another good quarter of expense discipline. Combined adjusted OpEx and SBC was $476 million in Q3, in the middle of our 2024 outlook range on a quarterly basis. Looking ahead to Q4, we're pleased that we're still on track for our full-year outlook range of $1.85 billion to $1.95 billion of adjusted OpEx and SBC, even while driving nearly 40% year-over-year revenue growth for the first three quarters of the year. We anticipate we will likely finish near the top end of that range given our continued growth investments to finish the year strong. Turning to capital management, we started our $1 billion share repurchase program in July. We allocated $97 million to repurchase 5 million shares in Q3 and made good initial progress on our expected two to three-year total timeline. We love deploying capital like this. It lowers our share count and positions us to increase EPS and free cash flow per share over time. When we look at last year's share repurchase, plus the start of our new program, we've deployed over $700 million to repurchase approximately 60 million of our shares, equivalent to about 7% of our current diluted count. We're continuing to repurchase shares daily in Q4. Before passing it back to Vlad, I'd like to comment on the strong momentum we are seeing so far in October. Net deposits are north of $4 billion, and cash suite balances are more than $25 billion. As for trading, equity notional volumes hit the highest month in over three years, option contracts look to be one of the highest months ever, and crypto notional volumes are over $5 billion on track to exceed the Q3 monthly average. Our crypto rebates have increased to 48 basis points in October relative to our 44 basis point average in Q3 and 35 basis points at the start of the year. Longer term, we're energized by the progress we're making and believe we are well-positioned to drive higher earnings and free cash flow per share over time, driven by our 20% plus net deposit growth, diversified business model, and 90% fixed cost base. With that, I'll turn the call back to Vlad.

Thanks, Jason. Now, I want to highlight our progress on the first part of our strategy: winning with active traders. Two weeks ago, we held our inaugural Hood Summit in Miami. It was really awesome to have over 400 active trader customers together for a few days, and we introduced three exciting new products. First, we announced Index Options, which are one of the fastest growing retail products and make up nearly 10% of U.S. retail options contracts. Our customers have been trading them on other platforms to date, so they're excited to bring their trades to Robinhood and leverage our industry-leading pricing while expanding our addressable market. Second, we announced Futures. Here, we're not only offering industry-leading pricing but also a great customer experience with our awesome Futures ladder. We continue to believe that Futures can be a nine-figure revenue business for us over time. Building out the infrastructure behind Futures has also enabled us to offer event contracts, including our new presidential election market that we launched. It was great to see customers quickly engage with this new product, trading over 10 million contracts in the first full day, and on track to more than double that today. Third, we launched Robinhood Legend, our new state-of-the-art desktop platform, which we built from the ground up for active traders. From customer feedback, it's clear that Legend is resonating, so we're doubling down on this new domain. While we are number one in mobile trading, that's only half the retail trading market today. The other half is on web, where we haven't meaningfully competed in the past. So launching Legend is doubling our addressable market. We have a lot of momentum in our active trader offering as we close out the year. In Q3 option volumes were up 47% year-over-year to a new record. And Q3 equity volumes also increased, up 65% year-over-year to a three-year high. This is even before the full rollout of index options, Futures, and Robinhood Legend. In closing, we had another strong quarter in Q3, and you should know, our team continues to work incredibly hard to deliver even more value to our customers. The roadmap is full; there's so much to do, and we're excited to share a lot more with you at our Investor Day in December. Now, let's move to questions.

Thank you, Vlad. For the Q&A session, we'll start by answering the top few shareholder questions from Say Technologies, ranked by number of votes. We passed over questions that we already addressed on this call or in prior quarters and grouped together questions that shared a common theme. After the Say questions, we'll turn to live questions from our analysts. So I'll kick it off with our first question from Say, which is for Vlad. Vlad, when will the Robinhood Gold card be available to all users?

Thank you for the question. First, I want to say we've really been humbled by the demand we've seen so far for the Gold credit card. The waitlist is close to 2 million, and so far, we've rolled it out to about 100,000 customers. If you compare this to how other successful credit card programs that are new have scaled, that's a pretty quick ramp. But of course, we recognize it's small compared to the waitlist. The waitlist, frankly, exceeded our expectations, and we're working as hard as we can to get it out as quickly as possible. It's also important for us to make sure we don't incur significant near-term losses. We have to understand customer behavior and the economics because the credit card business can get quite big. If we're not careful, that could mean losses. We like the behavior we're seeing. If it continues, over the next year, we expect to roll the card out to multiples of where we are today.

Right. Thank you, Vlad. The next question is also for you. It asks, are there any plans to introduce a way to send or receive money to other Robinhood users via the Robinhood ecosystem?

We've actually experimented with this in the past when we rolled out Robinhood Spending and the Robinhood Cash Card a couple years ago. Right now, the focus is really on the credit card offering. We're seeing amazing feedback and strong demand for that. But we do anticipate growing our offerings so that anything that you can do on another consumer finance app or product can be done on Robinhood as well. This is certainly something we're considering.

All right. The third question is also on Robinhood Gold. So, rate cuts make Robinhood Gold worse each time. How will gold continue to add value to users, and what new benefits is Robinhood planning to add for gold users? Also for Vlad.

The strategy with gold is to deliver an offering that provides customers with exceptional value in every market environment, regardless of whether the rates are increasing or decreasing. You should be able to get tremendous value from Robinhood Gold. Some value propositions naturally do well in an increasing rate environment, such as cash sweep with high APY. Other products tend to be more attractive in declining rate environments. At Hood Summit, we recently announced that gold customers will receive better pricing on a few of the new products we introduced. While the rates on sweeps may be coming down because of Fed cuts, we are going to keep investing in gold. For every new product we launch, we ask ourselves how we can make it even better for our gold subscribers. As we continue to roll out new products, gold should get better and better.

Great. Thank you, Vlad. And last one for you Jason. Jason, can you describe the plans for the live tax gain and loss monitoring that you're rolling out?

There's a couple things I'd highlight on tax management. We recognize it's really important for customers. Just yesterday, we announced a realized P&L tool shipped. That one's live for customers now. We also know that tax lot selection in the app is important for customers. I'm excited to tell you that we have employee beta testing going on right now for tax lots, and the team is pushing hard to get it in the hands of customers really soon.

We think it's really good. Yeah. I think you're going to like it.

All right. That concludes our shareholder questions from Say Technologies. We appreciate our shareholders taking the time to ask these questions of Vlad and Jason and the board and more next quarter. Now, I'll turn the call over to Catherine to lead Q&A from our analysts.

Your first question comes from Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Hope everyone's doing well. First, we want to congratulate you on the Legend launch. And I saw there were, I think, a thousand signups in the first 40 seconds, Vlad, post the launch. But what is the level of signups to date and how many of them are incremental signups to the 24.4 million accounts that are Robinhood as of September 30th?

We are still not quite ungated in the sense that anyone can just access it. We’ve been rolling out to multiples of that number but haven't opened it up to everyone yet. Early feedback is extremely positive. The level of live streamers and social media buzz has been tremendous. The team is motivated to keep the momentum and make sure the product improves because we feel we've got something great here.

Our next question comes from the line of Dan Dolev with Mizuho. Please go ahead.

Hey, Vlad. Hey, guys. Great results again. I'm very proud of you.

Thanks, Dan.

I was very intrigued with the presidential election market. I wanted to know how it's doing, how creative it is to overall retention? Anything you can tell us about it would be great. Thank you.

First off, we just rolled out to 100% of customers after starting the rollout this Monday. Huge kudos to the team for that. The path to offer this product was paved really less than 30 days ago. We moved quickly to make it available to customers ahead of the election. One of our focus areas is to win the active trader market, and I think offering products like this, which you can't really find at many competitors, is the best way to do that. Feedback is really good; you can see it resonating with customers on social media. We rolled it out to 100% right before the call started, so it's early to offer insights. But yesterday, we did about 10 million contracts, and we've already done more today.

Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Moley with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Yes. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I just had one on index options and futures trading. Now that you've announced the pricing on those products, I was hoping you could help us better understand the economics there. What do your margins look like in offering those contracts? How much do you expect to make per contract? And then if I could add a follow-on modeling question, it looks like your equity fee capture declined by about 20% sequentially. So any color there on what drove that would be helpful. Thanks.

Sure, Patrick. I'll go ahead and take both of those. This is Jason. So, just going index options first, the non-gold price will be industry-leading at $0.50 per contract and the gold price will be even better at $0.35 per contract. Cash settled index options is a fast-growing segment within options. We see this as a big opportunity for us to take market share faster. We've been taking double-digit market share for some time now and that's without having this hotter segment offer. Also on fees like exchange fees, we'll be passing those through to customers. On futures, non-gold will be $0.75 per contract and gold gets an even better deal at $0.50 per contract. We believe futures, based on volumes we've seen at our competitors, could be a nine-figure business for us. The second part of your question was equity take rates. There are two things affecting our take rate on equity. The first is volatility and the second is mix. In the quarter, customers were buying larger, more liquid names.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Bedell with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Great. Good evening, folks. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe just on the cadence of customer pickup as we move into Q4. Just on futures and index contracts in terms of what portion of the user base have you rolled the futures out to so far? And what are the rough plans for the rest of the quarter? If I could just sneak one more in on desktop users, good to hear the great feedback. Any observation yet on increased velocity from the folks that are using it so far?

The folks that use the Robinhood Legend product tend to be among our most active. The velocity is quite high. That said, we rolled it out to 1,000 people during the Robinhood Legend keynote and filled those slots in just 45 seconds. Those customers were keen and engaged to try the product. Early feedback is positive and it's important to establish a strong reputation among active traders who are networked and talk to each other. We’re getting positive signs from the community about Robinhood Legend. Regarding the timing for future index options and futures, our first Robinhood derivatives product is the presidential election market. Futures Outrights will likely roll out in the coming months, focusing on ensuring everything goes smoothly for the election next week.

Your next question comes from the line of Devin Ryan with Citizen JMP. Please go ahead.

Great. Hi, Vlad. Hi, Jason. How are you?

Great.

I want to ask a question just on interest rate sensitivity. We saw the first 50 basis points in Fed cuts. Last quarter, you mentioned 25 basis points as a $40 million impact which didn't take into consideration potential for accelerating margin utilization or higher SEC lending activity that often happens as rates come down. So, could you provide insights on whether you are seeing or expect to see an acceleration in margin, how you would frame the upside in SEC lending? Do you see a lot of upside in a normal environment, and are there any other offsetting forces we should think about besides the simple math of a rate times the balance?

You bet. The rate times the balance, again, this quarter would be roughly $40 million for each rate cut. On margin, we've been seeing nice growth in margin balances following the reduction of rates for customers. That growth has continued into October. We'll share that number in a couple of weeks. For SEC lending, we had about 400,000 additional customers join the program this year which is great for the long-term viability. We saw rates on specials that we get hard to borrows, come down a bit versus Q2. What you're seeing is that, but in terms of underlying business drivers, we feel good about that. We've discussed how we believe we have a naturally hedged business model, and as rates come down, we see interest rates become a tailwind for growth. You've started to see that with trading activity, with options at an all-time high in Q3 and equities hitting a multi-year high.

Your next question comes from the line of Benjamin Budish with Barclays. Please go ahead. You might be on mute, Benjamin.

Hi, sorry. This is Ben. Can you hear me?

Yes. We can hear you now.

Thank you for taking the question. I was wondering if you could talk about your path to product innovation and launch. It looks like with the active trader offering, the credit card, you're being very cautious and measured in terms of the rollout. How should we read that into future product development? I think we're all expecting a lot to be announced at the December Investor Day, including your broader ambitions in crypto and global brokerage offerings. Could you talk about your approach to product velocity and how we should think about the pace of rollout for current and future products?

It depends on the product we're talking about. For example, just this week with the presidential election market, we started the rollout on Monday and completed it on Wednesday, which is very quick for a new product. The credit card is different; nothing technological is preventing us from rolling that out. We want to ensure that we understand customer behavior and risks since the credit card business could get quite large. The waitlist of 2 million customers indicates significant demand, and we're onboarding people as quickly as possible. We expect to reach multiples of our current level over the next year.

Your next question comes from the line of John Todaro with Needham and Company. Please go ahead.

Hey, Vlad, Jason, thanks for taking the question. Just going back to the futures and index offerings, any expenses down the road that we should be thinking about increasing on the back of that? What drove the crypto rebates higher to 48 basis points?

I'll take both of those. First on the crypto rebates, we've been experimenting for some time and we've been seeing the rebate rate come up. We always want to provide great prices for customers while balancing returns generated for shareholders. We started the year at about 35 basis points and we've seen it move up, including running at 48 basis points in October. In terms of futures and index options, those products benefit from our broader technology structure, which gives us a low variable cost and high incremental margins as we grow those businesses.

Your next question comes from the line of Steven Chubak with Wolfe Advisor. Please go ahead.

Hi, good evening. I wanted to start off with a question on a chart in a recent presentation deck, showing the relationship between revenues and AUC. It has been a persistent trend in recent quarters. In this particular quarter, we saw some decoupling amid rate cuts and subdued trading activity. Can you speak to your confidence level that this relationship should ultimately still hold, even with further government rate cuts?

I feel really good about that relationship, Steven. To bridge revenue from Q2 to Q3, there are two distinctive factors: in Q2, we had seasonally high proxy revenue which was about $30 million, and you saw a reduction in Q3 as we moved past that quarter. The second factor was contra revenues on match promotions. We saw an increase to $27 million, with $14 million related to the 1% boost on gold deposits. We will be winding that down in November. Looking at Q4, we expect a similar incremental amount in contra revenues compared to Q2 to Q3, but then it will subside and grow more slowly. Overall, I feel confident about the core business.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Stein with FT Partners. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking the question. Could you discuss the deposit trends for some recent promotional offers? What’s your strategy for deposit bonuses going forward? Thank you.

We love the matches on deposits. Customers really respond well to them. From a finance perspective, we track the behavior of cohorts and dollars that come in. The 2023 match promotions have already paid off, with payback periods around one year for 1% and trending towards two to three years on retirement matches at 3%. We’re pleased with our third straight quarter of over $10 billion in net deposits and a long-term trend of 20% plus growth. Our Hood Week promotions brought in $2 billion and had a strong response from customers, alongside quick payback periods that show compounding benefits for the business over time.

Your last question comes from the line of Ken Worthington with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, this is Madeline Gliden on for Ken. Thanks for taking our question. Could you walk us through your ultimate decision to list these election-related event contracts, how they fit into the product roadmap, and ultimately, is Robinhood considering getting bigger into these more betting-type products?

Overall, as a philosophy, we want to make all product categories available for customers over time, particularly for active traders. We want Robinhood to be associated with being at the frontier of innovation and technology in financial services. Event contracts are regulated swaps markets that serve as legitimate hedging instruments for large institutions. If any tool or instrument is available for institutions, we have to make it available for retail as well. A secondary benefit is that it gives people a reliable data source about predictions.

This concludes our Q&A session. I will now turn the call back over to Vlad Tenev, Chairman and CEO, for closing remarks.

Thank you to everyone for listening, and to our institutional and retail analysts for continuing to engage. A special thank you to all the folks on social media who've been posting content and streaming using Robinhood Legend and sharing feedback. We really appreciate it.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.