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.

To date, 2026 has been a volatile year for stocks. The major indices started the year by moving higher, but that changed with the onset of the war with Iran on February 28. As oil prices began to climb rapidly, stock prices fell inversely. The Mag7 were out, but now seem to be back in (or at least most of them). AI was in and remains in. Of note, this is President Trump's second year in office, and typically, the second year of a presidency is weak for stocks. Meanwhile, inflation is slowly-and-steadily inching higher again and interest rates haven't budged since the Federal Reserve's last rate cut in December. In 1Q26, the S&P 500 fell 4.3%. In the Argus universe of more than 500 public companies, the average share-price decline was 0.3%, and the median decline was 2%. The following stocks are the top-10 and the bottom-five performers from the Argus universe during 1Q. Among the winners, we note that five are from Information Technology, two from Materials, two from Energy, and one from Healthcare. Why do we study past performance? We want to know which stocks weathered the storms that were presented, the mix of sector performance, and the emergence of new names in the performance derby.