TORONTO — If you were to guess which stocks have enjoyed the biggest runs in the past four and a half years, you might say Nvidia. Indeed, that is correct. But notably, shares of Robinhood have enjoyed an even greater climb during that same stretch.
Not only has its disruptive approach won over investors. It has also enabled the Silicon Valley-based business to expand rapidly into new markets, including Canada.
Robinhood officially launched in the Canadian market earlier this year, after completing its acquisition of the crypto-trading platform WonderFi. And it has plans that will take it well beyond crypto.
“We are really doubling down on our investment in the region and so we’ll have more to share soon. It’s absolutely our goal to offer more than just cryptocurrency,” Johann Kerbrat, senior vice-president and general manager, Crypto and International, told me in an interview.
Embracing change
While crypto is Robinhood’s first offering in Canada because of the WonderFi acquisition, it got its start in the U.S. as a commission-free stock trading platform more than a decade ago.
It became a household name during the pandemic, when a new generation of investors started trading on their phones. The meme-stock frenzy that fuelled some of that interest eventually cooled, but Robinhood kept building off that momentum.
During an appearance on BNN Bloomberg earlier this year, CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev noted the company now has 13 business lines, including crypto trading, that are generating more than US$100 million a year. Robinhood is growing rapidly in prediction markets and also executed one of the fastest credit card launches in fintech history.
Meanwhile, the company is placing a big bet on tokenization. In simple terms, that means creating a digital token that tracks the price of a stock and trades on a blockchain, so it can be bought and sold any time and anywhere. Robinhood launched its own blockchain in July and now offers roughly 200 tokenized U.S. stocks to investors outside the United States. Tenev has called this the start of a “tokenization supercycle,” and analysts at firms like Bernstein and StoneX have identified it as the company’s next big growth driver.
“We believe that we are just at the beginning of the tokenization phase of more and more types of assets. We started with U.S. stocks and ETFs because a lot of the globe is still not able to access easily this type of product,” Kerbrat said. “As long as you have a phone and an internet connection, you can create your blockchain wallet. We see a lot of our volume on our stock tokens that are happening on the weekends. If we were able to have instant settlements, we are going to be able to reduce the cost of capital for companies and retail customers.”
For now, the tokens are not available to investors in the U.S. or Canada.
I mentioned Robinhood’s stock has soared in the past four and a half years. That is largely tied to the company’s growth. Since 2020, the company’s adjusted revenue has grown by nearly 450 per cent. That’s based on Wall Street’s current projections for full-year revenue in 2026. Also importantly, what had been a money-losing business has become a profitable one, with fast-growing profits at that.
“It’s been really important to diversify the business,” Kerbrat added. “When the market is volatile, we do see some of these business lines getting an increase in revenue. And the opposite happens when the market is more calm. We see the other business lines like banking, credit cards, net interest increasing. This diversification really helps us weather whatever kind of macroeconomics we are having at the moment. Every year we have new products being launched that start at zero and then grow. Canada is part of this expansion. Hopefully in the next few years it will become one of these nine-figure businesses.”
The stock story
Even after the stock’s impressive run off its 2022 lows, Wall Street remains bullish on the Robinhood story. According to Bloomberg data, 85 per cent of the research firms covering the shares rate it a buy. One of our recent Ticker Take guests, Chris Stuchberry, portfolio manager at Wellington-Altus Private Wealth, identified Robinhood as one of his top growth stock picks.
He sees the company as the stock trading and financial services “super app” for the younger generation. Its continued growth, combined with profitability, is what makes it a name to keep watching.
As for the Canadian expansion, Robinhood opened an engineering hub in Toronto in 2024 and has been hiring aggressively, with a workforce heavy on graduates from local schools. The WonderFi deal added roughly 300,000 Canadian customers on top of that. Kerbrat, a native of France who spent a year studying at McGill University in Montreal, calls Canada a very important market for the company.
“We have 200 employees in the office right here. And the new office that we just opened has the capacity to double the workforce. Toronto is still one of the fastest-growing offices for Robinhood,” Kerbrat said. “We’ve been really excited about the talent that we’re able to recruit from Waterloo and University of Toronto and other universities here.”
The Ticker Take
Robinhood’s stock has rewarded investors who believed it could become far more than a trading app. Canada is the newest test of whether that bet keeps paying off.
Jon Erlichman is a BNN Bloomberg contributor and the host of Ticker Take on YouTube.
