Road to recovery: Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has a lot to celebrate this holiday season. After a bumpy few years following Robinhood's 2021 IPO, the 12-year-old company was just declared Yahoo Finance's "comeback stock" of the year. Shares of the commission-free trading app plummeted by more than 90% after it abruptly restricted trading in some meme stocks, but the company has since made a remarkable turnaround.

In a recent Zoom interview, Tenev was beaming with excitement, attributing the company's resurgence to a shift in public perception. "When we were a young company and just got started, everyone was kind of rooting for us," said Tenev, who oversees roughly 2,500 employees at Robinhood. "Then at one point we started being treated as an incumbent … the vibe became negative, [and] during COVID, it just became strange. [We] were growing like crazy, but people were unhappy, and we hit our low, and now it has been very positive."

However, it's what's around the corner that has Tenev truly excited. Like many fintech entrepreneurs, he's feeling enthusiastic about a second Trump administration, given that deregulation appears to be a priority, along with a warmer embrace of cryptocurrency. Tenev plans to take advantage of the fast-changing landscape, exploring opportunities in prediction markets, copytrading, and other innovative financial mechanisms.

One area of particular interest to Tenev is prediction markets, which allow clients to automatically replicate the trades of another trader. He believes that political contracts are the ideal product in this space, as they are highly correlated to market performance and can serve as a useful hedge. Tenev also sees the potential for prediction markets to revolutionize the way people consume news, providing real-time information on the likelihood of certain events occurring.

Roadmap for growth: Robinhood has already made significant strides in the prediction market space, launching its own presidential election market in a remarkably short two-and-a-half-week period. The company partnered with ForecastEx, a CFTC-registered designated contract market (DCM) for forecast contracts, to serve as the back end of its trades. Tenev revealed that Robinhood had considered acquiring Kalshi, a startup focused on prediction markets, but ultimately decided against it due to regulatory constraints.

Looking ahead, Tenev sees enormous potential for event contracts in various areas, including sports, economics, and entertainment. He envisions a future where event contracts become a digital equivalent of a newspaper, delivering real-time news and information to users. With over half a billion contracts traded in just one week, Tenev is confident that there is a strong demand for these types of products.

As the fintech landscape continues to evolve, Robinhood is poised to take advantage of emerging opportunities. With its comeback story serving as a testament to the company's resilience, Tenev's vision for the future is one of growth, innovation, and expansion into new and exciting areas.