HOOD
A Knicks chaos tax on market makers
The New York Knicks pulled off a comeback so absurd it basically turned one game into a stress test for prediction markets. Retail traders on Kalshi reportedly walked away with about $22 million, while market makers — especially Susquehanna — ate the loss. Not exactly the kind of night you put on a motivational poster.
Why Robinhood shows up in the story
Here’s the part that matters for you if you own HOOD: Susquehanna also makes markets on Rothera, the new CFTC-licensed exchange that Robinhood and Susquehanna invested in last year. Robinhood is already routing some event contracts there instead of Kalshi, which means the same retail frenzy that made Kalshi’s volume explode could start feeding a different pipe.
The business model subplot
Kalshi said it handled $872 million in trading volume that day, its biggest session ever. Great for Kalshi. Less great for Robinhood if a chunk of those event-contract dollars stops passing through the platform’s ecosystem and gets diverted elsewhere.
- Robinhood once accounted for nearly 60% of Kalshi’s volume, and that’s reportedly down to about 20% by April.
- The company is shifting World Cup and baseball contracts to Rothera.
- That could mean less flow for Kalshi, but potentially more control — and more economics — for Robinhood over time.
Big picture
This isn’t a giant revenue number on its own, but it’s a peek at where HOOD wants to go: more than just stocks and crypto, less dependent on someone else’s rails. If event trading keeps growing, the winner might be the platform that owns the pipe, not the one that merely catches the trades.