Motley Fool Staff, The Motley Fool Mon, November 9, 2026 at 6:27 PM EST 18 min read NVDA -3.43% HOOD +2.82% GC=F +0.84% MSFT +2.76% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Matt Frankel discuss:
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.
Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »
Before you buy stock in Robinhood Markets, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Robinhood Markets wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $341,966!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,146,819!*
Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 852% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 203% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors.
*Stock Advisor returns as of November 9, 2026.
This podcast was recorded on Oct. 28, 2026.
Travis Hoium: Earning season is in full swing. Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoium. I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and Matt Frankel. Guys, we are in the middle of that period of the year where I seem to be up until one in the morning every night just listening to conference calls. I don't know if you guys are as wacky as me. One of the big earners reports last night was Robinhood. This is one of the ones that we've talked about a fair amount here and on YouTube, but Matt, the market didn't seem particularly happy with Robinhood's results. Early in trading, the stock was down about 6%. There's some weakness in some things to like in the results. What stuck out to you?
Matt Frankel: Their member growth is slow. That's one of the key things. I follow the fintech industry very closely. A lot of companies are managing to grow their membership base. SoFi, for example, reported the highest single-quarter additions and members ever the same day Robinhood reported its earnings. But it's something that's worth watching, not worth panicking for. Robinhood's business model has really shifted from grow the user base at all costs to get more of your users'money. On the second half of that, they're actually doing a very good job.
Travis Hoium: Lou, this seems like one of those challenging companies to look at right now because we've exited the hypergrowth mode, where they were not only adding a lot of users, but also those users were adding a ton of assets to the platform. They were trading cryptocurrencies, brought in prediction markets now, which are doing extremely well. We're seeing weakness in some of these markets. They're not adding customers at the same rate that a company like SoFi is, and yet the stock is really expensive. That is ultimately the concern if this is a more mature company, and I love that Robinhood is growing their IRA business at an extremely rapid rate. But you're not going to make a ton of money off of IRA customers the way that you are off of crypto traders.
Lou Whiteman: That's it exactly. To their credit, they've come a long way. They are not this little start-up now. If user growth is slowing because Robinhood has captured so much of its target demographic that it's hard to go higher, but they are capturing more of the share of those customers, that's a great thing. That's a sign that this business, like you say, is maturing, but you also know what to pay for that. Maybe, Schwab it's too harsh to say Schwab — but this stock trades at 3X the multiple of Schwab. If they are becoming Schwab, look, they might be doing the right moves for the business. This might be exactly what they need to do. But as an investor, you have to understand that it could have massive impacts on the stock from here. They do have levers they can pull, and maybe Schwab is just undervalued. Interactive Brokers is maybe a better comparison because it still trades at a discount to Robinhood, but it's a lot closer. But look, something's got to give here as these companies mature and it's usually not just the market saying, let's just reprice everyone higher. It's usually regression to the mean.
Matt Frankel: I can name one thing just off the top of my head that they're doing a lot better than companies like SoFi, just to your point of maturity. You're right. They're not going to make a ton of money. Even if the average IRA has $100,000, you're charging no commissions on anything. That's not a very profitable model, but Robinhood Gold, their subscription product. That's something they're executing better than most other fintechs that have subscriptions up 34% year-over-year. Impressively, about 20% of Robinhood members, give or take, are Robinhood Gold members. 40% of their new customers are signing up for it. That's a very impressive figure.
Lou Whiteman: How about prediction markets, too? I don't know, guys, event contracts were up 230% year-over-year.
Matt Frankel: You like gambling, Lou.
Lou Whiteman: You tell me what that is. But isn't it ironic for years? It was like, is DraftKings a big winner? Is this a Forget DraftKings. We might have finally found a company that can profit off of sports betting. Go Robinhood. They seem to be doing this. Again, maybe we want this a one stop shop where I can gamble not just my disposable income, but my retirement funds, too. I wouldn't want that. I'm kidding. But look, if this is what people want and they are providing the hub where you could do all of this more, it works out well for them. It might actually work out for their customers, too, as they mature, they have if you're a Draft Kings doing whatever you're doing, you can't get cross sold an IRA or a retirement. Maybe it's good for society, too, to have them soaking up the attention, soaking up the funds, and then we can see what they do with it.
Travis Hoium: Just so listeners are clear, you cannot do predictions in your retirement account on Robinhood.
Travis Hoium: They are separate. You can make these other little accounts. They actually, I think, separated them all off. There's a specific predictions tab. If you don't want to open it, you don't want to see it. That's actually an option now, which is nice as somebody who doesn't go into that tab all that often. When I go into my Robinhood account, I just want to see what's in my Robinhood account. But maturation is a great thing for businesses in a lot of ways. The challenge is, what do you pay for it? It seems like the market is trying to figure that out. When we come back, we're going to talk about the latest with Oracle. More on that in a moment.
Welcome back to the show. When Oracle started on its massive AI build-out, it was going to be an Nvidia shop, and OpenAI was going to be its biggest customer. But Lou, we learned yesterday that Oracle is now open for business, no matter what chip you're making. Sounds like they're going to be carrying Google's TPUs, OpenAI's Jalapeno chip. This seems like a pretty big shift for one of the biggest cloud infrastructure companies out there.
Lou Whiteman: I feel like it's reaffirming what the narrative is already, and I think it's the accurate narrative, just this idea that the compute layer is becoming commoditized. If not commoditized, people want multiple options for different things.
Travis Hoium: [OVERLAPPING] You don't want to get locked in, is that correct thinking.
Lou Whiteman: Right. Also, look, certain things. If you are driven by cost and driven by efficiency, then not all chips are created the same and you are going to want different solutions for different problems. Oracle among all of these guys, they should be agnostic. They don't have a model like say Google does. It makes sense for them to be we are the home for everything for them, too, just the idea of just spreading your bets and make sure you don't get too tied to one player as the market evolves. This is just common sense taking over for what, maybe zealotry at the beginning and just making the business work. I think it's just part of a trend that will continue.
Travis Hoium: Matt, how do you think about this with the whole industry? Because it seems like three years ago, it seems like Nvidia is going to win everything related to artificial intelligence. It doesn't appear that that's going to be the case, whether that's something like TPUs, which is getting attention. But also these custom chips, I think that's really going to be interesting over the next year or two from OpenAI. Then you have the big choke point, which is TSMC. TSMC doesn't just want to be Nvidia shop. If Nvidia chips are undersupplied, that could partly be because TSMC wants to allocate to Broadcom and to Google and to OpenAI and all these other companies.
Matt Frankel: You just said some of this was out of necessity. It's not just the strategy of being an agnostic player. It's necessity. There aren't enough chips to go around. If you're sticking to Nvidia chips, it really limits how fast you can build your data centers out. Oracle's edge is being able to build their data centers fast and deliver on that backlog that everyone's so worried about. Being chip-agnostic, it widens their customer pool. Like you said, it reduces their dependence on any one supplier. It also deepens that relationship with OpenAI, which is half of their backlog. By using their chips, you're making them happy. Making a company happy who is committed to paying you $300 billion for your services is a pretty smart strategic move.
Travis Hoium: Lou, if you're an Nvidia shareholder right now, what are you thinking about news like this?
Lou Whiteman: Again, I think we're in this weird state where the best growth days related to AI are over, but that doesn't mean the music has stopped. I think we actually have seen this in the last few quarters, just the market's reaction. The sense is that I think Nvidia can sustain these elevated numbers that we've seen, but maybe we're not going to see them keep growing the same way. That's not ideal for a shareholder, but it's fine. I can deal with that. As long as it's not falling off a cliff, I think they'll be fine.
Travis Hoium: Are we starting to see the shape of what this market will actually look like in the future? It seems like a few years ago, it was just all Gaga growth, buy Nvidia chips as fast as you can. Now, it seems like companies are starting to think about, where do we want to be strategically long term? What Cloud infrastructure companies do we want to have as our counterparties? What chips do we want to be using? It seems like it's much more of a we talked about maturation in relation to Robinhood, but it seems like this is a more mature decisions on the part of all these AI players diversifying, commoditizing your complements. If you have the power, you can do those kinds of things.
Lou Whiteman: I don't know if we're mature yet. I think we are still in a land grab, but the land grab is shifting. I think the big thing that this comes back to is that there is a focus now on efficiency, overall spending. Like how can we spend smart versus just get anything out there before? Yes, the market is evolving. I think I'd be surprised if we are at its solid state yet. I think we still have evolutions to go, but that's where we are now.
Matt Frankel: I would agree with that and I would also point out that, with Oracle, one, their Investor Day is today. We got a lot of clarity on their chip strategy and things like that. We don't know their financial strategy, which is really to tie it back into what you were saying. That's the part that we don't know where it's not mature. We don't know what the financing is going to look like. These companies are going to have to find more capital-light ways to do what they're doing in a lot of cases. You can't just exponentially grow your borrowing, even if you're a Google or a Microsoft or whatever. I think we're not at maturity yet. There's a lot of unknowns, maybe not as many as two years ago. But in terms of how all this is being paid for, I think we're still in the very early stages of answering that question.
Travis Hoium: We are going to learn more even after the market closes today when Microsoft reports earnings. We'll talk about their recent layoffs in a month.
ADVERTISEMENT: Hey, Fidelity. What's it cost to invest with the Fidelity app. Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on U.S. stocks and ETFs. That's music to my ears. I can only talk. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Zero account fees apply to retail accounts only. $0 commission does not apply to customers designated by Fidelity as a professional equity trader. A limited number of ETFs are subject to a service fee of $100. See details at fidelity.com/commission. Fidelity Broker Services LLC member NYSE SIPC.
ADVERTISEMENT: Let Abercrombie handle the season ahead. They've always set the standard for autumn outfitting with key pieces for the season. Sweaters, layers, and everyday denim make cooler weather dressing easy, while polished shirts and tailored pieces take you from day to night. When the holidays arrive, elevated essentials and occasion-ready styles make dressing for every plan easy. From autumn days to holiday nights, find the pieces for the season ahead. Shop Abercrombie in the app, online, and in stores.
Travis Hoium: Welcome back to the show. Microsoft is going to be reporting earnings after the market closes on Thursday, so we don't have that news yet, but we did find out earlier this week that the company is going to be I guess it's not layoffs, Matt, of 60,000 people. It is voluntary buyout offers, probably. But they want to cut their workforce. This seems like one of these things as we talk about more artificial intelligence: you're either going to grow your way into that market and all this spending in a payoff, or you're going to cut your way, and this is the cut side, it seems.
Matt Frankel: The 60,000 number, take that with a big grain of salt. That's who's eligible for this voluntary exit offer. It's not going to be nearly that many. History tells us it could be thousands because this has been a year of Microsoft trimming its headcount. They did their first-ever round of voluntary buyouts, and this is a company that's been around since the '80s, so that's pretty significant. The first-ever round of voluntary buyouts happened in April. They did a round of layoffs in July, and both were in the mid-single-digit thousands range, including those voluntary buyouts. I would expect the actual number to be a fraction of that 60,000. That would represent 27% of their workforce. They don't want 27% of their workforce to leave at the same time. The real thing here is at one AI is replacing some work, so there's that narrative that we need fewer people. A lot of companies, Block has done layoffs and blamed it on that recently On the other hand, companies like Microsoft and I talked about this in the last segment are going to have to figure out how to pay for all their AI build-out. They don't want to just grow their debt forever and ever. They don't want to dilute shareholders forever and ever. Reducing headcount is a way to free up capital to pay for the AI build-out. It serves two purposes. I'm curious as to what the real number is going to be, but it's a sign that big tech has to find ways to pay for this.
Travis Hoium: This is a strategy that Oracle has also deployed to a company that we just talked about.
Lou Whiteman: As Matt said, this isn't a layoff. Maybe it's like Gwyneth Paltrow. It's a conscious uncoupling or something like that. We need better words for this, but we need to underline what Matt said, because, yes, they are offering this to 60,000 people. There is no way in heck they want anything near there. You offer this broadly so you get some. It's going to be well short of that. I think that needs to be said. These are always interesting, though, buyouts, because you tend to sometimes lose the people you want to keep, so you have to be careful there, like the ones who are confident enough to get another job. Sometimes the first one's out the door, but it is just a way to thin the headcount. I'll say, too, I don't know what to think. I don't think that we necessarily say, oh, because AI works or anything like that.
Look, even if all 60,000 take it. Even if Microsoft allowed that to happen, because remember, if that happened, they'd probably say no to most of them. But even if all 60,000 leave, Microsoft would still have a higher headcount than they did in 2019. There was a lot of bloat during the pandemic. We've talked about this forever, but to some extent, this is using AI to reverse that bloat, and all of these layoffs have been. I don't think we can say this proves that they are seeing efficiency up. I certainly don't think that's true of the overall economy. There was just an apographic out that yes, revenue per worker is up at the Mag 7 since 2022. But adjusted for inflation. The S&P 493, the rest, they have not seen any revenue per worker gains since pre-COVID. Maybe it's coming, but I think it's much too early to say, oh, this is relevant or this is signal as far as how AI is doing. I just don't think we know yet.
Travis Hoium: To put this number into context, so far, according to layoffs dot FYI, 135,000 tech employees laid off at 333 companies so far in 2026. In 2023, that number was over 260,000. We are not seeing huge job cuts across the board in tech. That narrative isn't quite maybe what it would seem to be at the moment.
As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows The Motley Fool's editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising and disclosure, please check out our show notes. For Lou Whiteman, Matt Frankel, and Dan Boyd behind the glass, I'm Travis Hoium. Thanks for listening. We'll see you here tomorrow.
Charles Schwab is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Lou Whiteman has positions in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Matt Frankel, CFP® has positions in Block, Oracle, and SoFi Technologies and has the following options: long June 2027 $150 calls on Oracle, long September 2028 $220 calls on Oracle, short June 2027 $165 calls on Oracle, and short September 2028 $270 calls on Oracle. Travis Hoium has positions in Alphabet, Block, Robinhood Markets, and SoFi Technologies. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Block, Broadcom, Interactive Brokers Group, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool recommends Charles Schwab and Robinhood Markets and recommends the following options: long January 2027 $43.75 calls on Interactive Brokers Group, short January 2027 $46.25 calls on Interactive Brokers Group, and short September 2026 $95 calls on Charles Schwab. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Is Robinhood Stock Too Expensive? was originally published by The Motley Fool
