Bernstein Puts a $160 Target on HOOD, Citing Prediction Markets and Perps

The $160 Re-Rate

HOOD's 8.08% move to $107.30 has a clean, single cause: Bernstein's Gautam Chhugani raised his price target to $160 from $130 and reiterated Outperform, and the stock ran more than 8% off a $99.28 close to do it. The thesis is not about the core commission-free brokerage — it is about three higher-margin businesses Bernstein thinks Robinhood can scale into a $70 billion industry fee pool: prediction markets, perpetual futures, and tokenized equities. Prediction markets alone get pegged at $1.7 billion of revenue by 2028, a 64% CAGR. And the traction is already on the tape: Q1 "other transaction revenue," the line that captures event contracts and futures, jumped 320% year over year to $147 million, with roughly 5.2 billion event contracts traded in June.

Robinhood Wants to Own the Venue

There is a self-referential joke here that perps traders should appreciate: HOOD trades as a HIP-3 perp, and the growth story Bernstein just paid up for is Robinhood building out its own perpetual futures and derivatives venue. The same day the target hit, Robinhood opened agentic trading — letting customers wire AI agents into dedicated brokerage accounts to research, execute, and manage portfolios, with the blunt warning that automated strategies can move fast enough to zero an allocation. Underneath it all is Robinhood Chain, the company's Arbitrum-based layer-2, which Bernstein treats as the long-term rail for onchain real-world assets it sizes at $2–4 trillion by 2030. Buy the number or not, the direction is clear: Robinhood is trying to stop being a broker that routes flow and start being the exchange that captures it.

The Round Trip and the July 29 Test

Zoom out and this is a round trip. HOOD is back to almost exactly where it sat on July 8, when the post-launch Robinhood Chain run unwound to $107.10; the stock gave that back toward $99 and Bernstein's note is what pulled it forward again. Needham stacked a second bull call the same session, lifting its target to $123 from $97 on a Buy rating. The honest counterpoint: analyst targets are not results, and the last reported quarter Robinhood printed $1.07 billion of revenue against a $1.14 billion consensus — a miss. All of it gets marked to market on Q2 earnings, due July 29, a binary event this close to the print. On Hyperliquid the perp is mirroring the equity on a thin ~$8.6 million of 24-hour volume, so read this as the cash tape leading, not perp positioning.