Robinhood embraces copy trading after warning competitors about regulatory risks

Summary

What a difference a changing regulatory environment makes. Roughly nine months after suggesting that a young copy trading platform could only operate because it flew “under the radar” of regulators, Robinhood has announced its own entry into the space with “Robinhood Social,” a new feature that will allow users to follow and manually replicate the trades of prominent investors. The move represents a striking about-face for the online brokerage, which has historically been cautious about features that could attract regulatory scrutiny. The company famously ditched its celebratory digital confetti feature ahead of its 2021 IPO after regulators raised concerns about gamifying trading, making its embrace of copy trading, another potentially gamified feature, all the more notable. This wariness was on full display in December, when in a conversation with this editor about upstart copy trading platform Dub, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev suggested that such platforms could operate primarily because of their smaller size, proposing that “copy trading could become of greater interest to regulators” and that Dub may not yet be under the “magnifying glass” because of its “comparatively smaller size.” Now, Robinhood is betting that the regulatory landscape has changed enough to safely enter the copy trading market. The timing is particularly notable given the pointed criticism Robinhood faced earlier this year from Dub’s 23-year-old founder Steven Wang, who has positioned his platform as a more educationally-focused alternative to traditional trading apps. “I have a lot of respect for what [CEO] Vlad [Tenev] has done in making trading free,” Wang told me back in February. “But at the end of the day, making it super easy to trade without expert guidance, without education, is really just gambling for the broader population.” Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 Wang has consistently argued that Dub’s approach – which includes risk scores, risk-adjusted returns, and po...