Robinhood has gained a new group of retail investors, with the oldest being 1 year old and the youngest -3 years old.

Original | Odaily Star Daily Report（@OdailyChina）

Author｜Azuma（@azuma_eth）

Local time on April 6, the U.S. Department of the Treasury officially announced the latest developments regarding “Trump Accounts” — BNY Mellon Bank (BNY) has been selected as the Treasury’s designated financial agent for managing the initial accounts; Robinhood will work with BNY as the broker and initial trustee for the “Trump Accounts.”

All parties will jointly support the Treasury’s goals to ensure that every eligible newborn child in the United States can quickly and conveniently access a “Trump Account.”

What is a “Trump Account”?

So-called “Trump Accounts,” also known as 530A accounts, are a tax-deferred investment account program authorized on June 9, 2025 by then U.S. President Trump under the “Build Back Better” law, aimed at establishing government-funded savings accounts for the children of U.S. citizens born between January 1, 2025 and January 1, 2029.

The initial funding for “Trump Accounts” mainly comes from government allocations, private donations, and family deposits. The federal government will provide $1,000 in initial funding for each account; in December last year, Dell founder Michael Dell and his wife announced a $6.25 billion donation to open accounts for 25 million children in households with a median regional income below $150k, injecting $250 into each account; parents, friends, and other specific individuals can also deposit into the designated accounts, but each child can receive no more than $5,000 per year.

Odaily Note: Michael Dell and his wife, who donated $6.25 billion, whom Trump called it “one of the most generous acts in U.S. history.”

On the investment side, “Trump Accounts” will be limited to low-cost investment funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that track broad stock market indices such as the “S&P 500” index, and cannot be used to invest in specific industry indices or specific sector indices. The use of funds is also restricted: before the child turns 18 and on or before January 1 of that year when the child becomes a legal adult, the funds in the account may not be withdrawn for any reason (unless the child passes away or the funds are transferred to another similar restricted account). After the child turns 18, the account’s treatment will be the same as a traditional individual retirement account (IRA).

Under the current plan, “Trump Accounts” are expected to begin accepting their first deposits on July 4, 2026 (the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence). At that timing, it is right on the eve of the 2026 midterm election cycle, and is expected to become an important policy “killer move” for the Republican Party to win over voters.

How big could it be?

According to Statista’s statistics, since 2020, the number of births in the U.S. has roughly fluctuated around about 3.6 million per year.

Using this data as a benchmark, for the coverage period from January 1, 2025 to January 1, 2029, the number of newborn children eligible in the U.S. is expected to reach about 14.4 million; if the federal government opens a “Trump Account” with $1,000 for each child, that would mean a massive $14.4 billion; and with potential private donations and family deposits added in, this figure would continue to grow to hundreds of billions of dollars. If the program can still be carried forward as a long-term plan after 2029, its potential scale would be even more extraordinary.

Due to operational features such as long-term lockup, passive investing, and ongoing incremental additions, at its core a “Trump Account” will essentially become a long-term passive pool of capital with a potential scale of hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. Compared with simply being a child welfare attribute, this is more like establishing a long-term capital conduit between fiscal policy and capital markets, directly bringing the next generation of people into the stock market system.

Biggest beneficiary: Robinhood?

After the “Trump Accounts” plan was made public, financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, Charles Schwab, and Robinhood began competing fiercely around related services, and with the U.S. Treasury formally designating Robinhood as the broker and initial trustee yesterday, Robinhood—having secured the “entry ticket”—is expected to become one of the most direct beneficiaries of the program.

The most straightforward upside is on the user side. Based on the scope of the current policy, calculations suggest that “Trump Accounts” will correspond to tens of millions of newborn accounts, and the interaction entry points for these accounts will be consolidated through a single application—in other words, Robinhood will gain a batch of potential users who are tied to the platform from birth; the oldest among them are only about 1 year old, and the youngest may not even be born yet… More importantly, these users are not one-time traffic, but potential customers with extremely long lifecycles. After children turn 18, their accounts will convert into long-term investment accounts similar to IRAs, meaning Robinhood has the opportunity to directly carry these users into their post-adulthood investment behavior, and further extend into more business scenarios such as ETFs, options, and even crypto assets. From a lifecycle perspective, this is nearly the longest user path a brokerage can obtain.

The upside on the asset side is also significant and cannot be ignored. “Trump Account” funds have a clear long-term lockup characteristic: they almost never flow out before children become adults, and the investment scope is further limited to index funds. For brokerages, this type of capital is extremely high-quality custody assets—low volatility, high retention, and a predictable scale. In addition, Robinhood’s traditional core label has been a “retail trading platform,” with growth highly dependent on market conditions and trading activity; but “Trump Accounts” introduce low-frequency, long-term, passive investment capital, which is more similar to the funding characteristics of traditional wealth management businesses. As the share of such capital increases, to a certain extent it will also enrich Robinhood’s business diversification and make up for relatively weaker areas.

At the same time, the endorsement at the policy level also carries symbolic significance. By participating in an account program led by the Treasury, Robinhood enters the U.S. government’s financial infrastructure system for the first time. This not only enhances its credibility at the institutional level, but also creates a new narrative space for it to expand into retirement accounts, long-term investing, and wealth management businesses in the future.

From a political perspective, “Trump Accounts” are an important policy bargaining chip for the Republican Party ahead of the midterm elections; from a capital market perspective, this plan introduces a制度化 source of long-term capital into the U.S. stock market. Robinhood happens to stand at the intersection of both—when millions of newborns who haven’t entered society yet have already “opened accounts automatically,” the policy design aimed at winning votes also quietly lays out a growth curve for Robinhood that could last more than ten years.