There are plenty of investors that want to trade 24/7 and Robinhood (HOOD) wants to help them. CEO Vlad Tenev tells Yahoo Finance that "as leaders of the industry, we have to push the industry forward,” stating he sees weekend clearing as the biggest challenge to achieving the round the clock trading.

Tenev says is he "keen" to take on the clearing over the weekend problem, but insists that active participation from various brokers is ultimately what will lead to weekend clearance becoming more “palatable” to regulatory bodies.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Video Transcript

- Why isn't 24-hour, why isn't that industry standard? This is 2023, we're almost on the verge of 2024. It seems ridiculous it's not.

VLAD TENEV: Well, it will be the industry standard. Someone just has to do it first, and in that case Robinhood was the first to push that innovation forward. There was a lot that needed to be done both on the technology side and user experience side to make it a reality.

Having different market centers stitched together seamlessly, so that a customer can place an order and not have to understand the details of how those orders are being routed between different areas, having the overnight session work seamlessly, these are all things that took a while to build and get the experience just right.

But you're seeing the actual benefit of that in recent days and weeks. When you look at the share of screenshots on Sunday nights and late at night that are posted about stocks, Robinhood is taking the lion's share of that. I'm sure you saw that last night with crypto prices going up.

Bitcoin crossed 40,000. Customers were curious what crypto stocks were doing during that time period. And Robinhood's one of the only places that allows that type of visibility, and allows you to actually transact and manage risk during those hours. So to have truly around the clock seamless trading, we have to solve the clearing over the weekend problem.

And historically there hasn't been much of an impetus to actually solve that. And that's something that I'm keen to take on. I do believe part of my role is rather than just in addition to growing Robinhood, making our product as good as possible, I think as leaders of the industry, we have to push the industry forward. And I think, we love being entrepreneurs in America. And it's very important to me for our capital markets to continue to be the most vibrant and innovative. And so I think we'll solve this problem one way or another--

- Soon? is it soon?

VLAD TENEV: I'm excited to push and lead the charge forward there.

- Is it soon? In our lifetime are we 24/7?

VLAD TENEV: I hope it's soon. I think the big problem for 24/7 would be figuring out clearing over the weekend. But I think the success that we've seen and the obvious value to 24-hour market that we've seen, and since we last spoke we've rolled it out to more symbols, we're now at over 200 symbols after adding another 100 last week.

We're seeing liquidity improve. We're seeing more customers engaging with it, particularly the active traders, more interest online. And so these things actually help get the counterparties more excited. And as more brokers try to add this capability to customers, I think then it will become the activation energy to getting clearing over the weekends to happen becomes a little bit more palatable.