HODU traders get a football catalyst from the Rothera shift

Prediction-market volume is turning into a football-season story for Robinhood Markets, and the single-stock leveraged ETF built on the stock—Direxion Daily HOOD Bull 2X (HODU), which attempts 200% of the daily move—is drawing fresh attention as analysts add event-contract catalysts, ETF Trends reports.

The newest catalyst is Rothera, a prediction-market venue Robinhood operates with market maker Susquehanna International Group, and Morgan Stanley's Michael Cyprys—who upgraded HOOD earlier this week—argues the venue extends Robinhood's distribution advantage into infrastructure. Piper Sandler's Patrick Moley gets more specific: Robinhood has spent recent months steering event-contract volume to Rothera and away from Kalshi, and he expects the World Cup volume already seen to be a leading indicator for the NFL and college football seasons, where a U.S.-centric user base should be more active. The payoff, in Moley's model, lands in Robinhood's third- and fourth-quarter prediction-market revenue.

The history gives the forecast its weight: during the 2025 football season, HOOD users accounted for 22% to 30% of all volume traded on Kalshi, Moley says, but as Kalshi has worked to acquire more of its own users, that share has fallen to the mid-single digits. That decline is precisely the case for Rothera—Robinhood no longer needs to be a volume supplier to another venue when it can keep the users and the event-contract economics in-house. Prediction markets, in ETF Trends' telling, are the fastest-growing business in Robinhood's history, and the Rothera structure points that growth back toward the parent company.

For HODU, the setup is a clean single-stock lever on a calendar-driven flow. The warning label is inside the fund's name: HODU targets twice Robinhood's daily performance, so a position carried across a full season is a daily-reset compounding bet, not a two-times-the-stock hold. That makes the fund a trading vehicle for a defined window, not a portfolio position awaiting fourth-quarter results. HODU carries the same daily timing tax this publication flagged in Direxion's leveraged Treasury pair: the longer the holding period, the more the product's objective and the investor's intuition diverge.

The football calendar gives HODU a reason to trade and the daily reset decides how much of the move a holder actually keeps; the first report that matters is Robinhood's third-quarter prediction-market revenue line, where Rothera's share gains should show up if Moley's model is right. HODU will compound its way through every session between now and then.