Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Robinhood Markets operates a brokerage platform that lets clients trade stocks, options, futures, and cryptocurrencies. The company also has a dedicated Prediction Markets hub, where clients can trade event contracts on various outcomes, including sports, economics, and politics. The shares were added to the S&P 500 in September 2025.

Wednesday saw another eruption in crude oil, with WTI exploding over 8% and trading at $108.50/barrel late in the day. Brent oil soared over 9% to $121.30/barrel. WTI is near its highest close since the war started, which was $113, while Brent hit a new high, taking out its prior high close near $113 from March 30. Gasoline futures popped over 5% to a new high of $3.61/gallon, up 80% since February 24 when it traded at just $2.00/gallon. Energy stocks have, of course, benefited. The Energy Select SPDR (XLE) ripped higher by 2.3%, the S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production (XOP) surged 3.5%, and the VanEck Oil Services (OIH) rose 'only' 1%. The OIH and the Dow Jones U.S. Oil Equipment & Services Index were the only oil indices to reach all-time highs on Wednesday. An oddity we discovered about the recent decline and (now) wicked reversal to the upside is the action of the S&P 500's daily Bollinger Bands (BB). Generally, the width of the BBs will peak near or at the bottom of a pullback or correction, this as declines are usually faster than uptrends. At the recent bottom, the BBs were almost 9% apart -- but during the ensuing rally, the BB width was over 15%. Looking at the period from February to June 2025, the width of the bands peaked on April 21, right near the bottom at nearly 18%. After the S&P 500 rallied back to the prior high, the width of the band was only 4%. Still, during the 2023 pullback, the peak in the width of the BB occurred during the rally phase. In the 2022 bear market, the BB width peaked in June, more than three months before the bottom.

Robinhood is a diversified financial services provider best known for its retail brokerage platform, which historically caters to a young, risk-seeking clientele that trades heavily on margin and in higher-risk asset classes like options, futures, cryptocurrencies, and more recently, in prediction markets. As those customers’ financial needs have begun to mature, Robinhood has rolled out a suite of more conventional products, from retirement accounts to high-yield cash sweep accounts to nascent advisory services (Robinhood Strategies). With $322 billion in customer assets and 27 million active accounts at year-end 2025, the firm has emerged as a significant player in the large, quickly growing US brokerage market.

Since the onset of the Iran war, the U.S. Treasury yield curve has maintained an upward slope, signaling economic growth in the quarters ahead. But it has also shifted a bit -- with a few implications for the economic and interest rate outlooks. First of all, the curve has pushed higher. Back in late February, the 2-year Treasury note yield was 3.4% and the 10-year yield was 4.0%. Now, those rates are 3.7% and 4.2%, respectively. While the rates are down a bit in the past few weeks, this general shift higher in the yield curve implies that inflation may be poised to make a comeback, likely driven by higher energy prices as oil prices have skyrocketed during the war. Second, that upward slope of the yield curve has flattened out a bit. In late February, the spread between the 2-year and 10-year bonds was 60 basis points. Now, that spread is down to 50 basis points. The tightening of the yield curve points toward a potential slowdown in the rate of economic growth (though we note that the curve is nowhere near an inverted state, which has long been associated with economic weakness). Looking ahead, we anticipate that the yield curve will maintain its upward slope through 2027. This forecast assumes that the war in Iran ends in the not-too-distant future, oil prices come down off their highs, and the Federal Reserve, with a new chairman at the helm, will be in position to lower short-term interest rates at least once later this year.