Press Release
Use Volatility In Your Favor With Robinhood Options Trading In April, Volatility Index VIX Hit Highest Mark
–News Direct–
By Meg Flippin, Benzinga

Thanks to their large upside potential, many seasoned traders choose to trade options to play the markets. Fintechs like Robinhood have made accessing the market easier for seasoned traders to fine-tune their strategies, building based on their trading level.
With inflation remaining stubborn, the markets appearing to be waiting for the Federal Reserves next move on interest rates and the U.S. about to enter what is expected to be a polarizing presidential election, volatility has been high. In April, the VIX Index which Wall Street uses to gauge volatility in the market hit its highest level since late October 2023, when the Israel-Hamas conflict began. Year-to-date, the VIX Index is up more than 12%.
Options Abound With Options Trading
While volatility may scare buy-and-hold investors, for active options traders, some look at it as an opportunity. After all, with options trading, investors can engage in a variety of diverse strategies that have the potential to work in all sorts of market conditions, whether it's speculating stocks will go up or down based on their bearish and bullish outlooks. Options are also cheaper than buying shares outright, creating leverage, which means the gains on your investment could be amplified as can losses. However, options expire, and you can lose your entire investment in a short period of time. Some strategies present a potential for substantial or even unlimited losses.
Then there are the hedging capabilities that come with options, which can help mitigate the dangers of high-risk, high-reward instruments. If an investor is worried a stock is going to fall they can purchase puts that enable them to sell the stock at a strike price, regardless of where the stock falls prior to expiration of the option. The same cant be said of stocks. If shares tank, you dont have any downward protection other than to sell and limit your losses. However, if the stock goes up or doesnt move prior to expiration, the option will expire worthless and the loss is equal to the premium paid.
Leveling The Playing Field For Options Investors
Accessing options trading is getting even easier thanks to Robinhoods trading platform. Not only do customers get access to options but also advanced charts, including the ability to track and modify technical indicators such as moving average, relative strength index and moving average convergence divergence. Furthermore, there are no contract fees.*
Other powerful features of Robinhoods platform include the ability to save and monitor options contracts to see hypothetical returns and options rolling in which you can seamlessly adjust and extend your positions. And lets not forget 24-hour support. If you have a question on your option strategy even in the wee hours of the morning, Robinhood has you covered.
Even retirement accounts and cash account holders can trade options with Robinhood. The same cant be said of some of Robinhoods rivals.
Robinhoods efforts to improve access are not surprising. For some time now, the company has been on a mission to level the playing field when it comes to investing by providing access to an array of investment and retirement products, keeping costs down and commissions at zero (other fees apply). Take Robinhood Gold for one example. Gold subscribers get 5% APY on uninvested cash in their brokerage account, a 1% boost on brokerage transfers and instant deposits.
None of this is lost on options traders, which is why that part of Robinhoods business is growing, and options traders are taking note. Robinhood is making moves to grow its market share even more. We want to be number one in the active trader market. So active traders are very important for us, Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev said in a recent interview. They care about very specific things like performance, pricing, user experience. And we're making lots of investments there both in the user experience and in new product innovations that other competitors don't offer, 24-hour market being a great example there.
Options trading is growing in popularity as regular retail investors learn its virtues. Robinhood wants to be a leader in the space and is pulling out all the stops to achieve that.
Featured photo by Nicholas Cappello on Unsplash.
Benzinga is a leading financial media and data provider, known for delivering accurate, timely, and actionable financial information to empower investors and traders.
This post contains sponsored content. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.
Disclaimer:
*There are no contract fees charged directly by Robinhood. However Robinhood does pass through certain fees charged by securities regulators and exchanges.
Commission-free trading of stocks, ETFs and options refers to $0 commissions for Robinhood Financial self-directed individual cash or margin brokerage accounts that trade U.S. listed securities and certain OTC securities electronically. Keep in mind, other fees such, Gold subscription fees, wire transfer fees, and paper statement fees may apply to your brokerage account. Please see Robinhood Financial's Fee Schedule to learn more.
Options trading entails significant risk and is not appropriate for all customers. Customers must read and understand the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before engaging in any options trading strategies. Options transactions are often complex and may involve the potential of losing the entire investment in a relatively short period of time. Certain complex options strategies carry additional risk, including the potential for losses that may exceed the original investment amount.
Robinhood Financial does not guarantee favorable investment outcomes. The past performance of a security or financial product does not guarantee future results or returns. Customers should consider their investment objectives and risks carefully before investing in options. Because of the importance of tax considerations to all options transactions, the customer considering options should consult their tax advisor as to how taxes affect the outcome of each options strategy. Supporting documentation for any claims, if applicable, will be furnished upon request.
Rolling options does not ensure a profit or guarantee against a loss. An investor may also end up compounding their losses. By rolling out, the duration is extended, which can also increase risks as there's more time for the underlying security's price to move unfavorably.
One of the key downsides of options vs stocks is that options contracts expire over time. For puts, If the stock price is at or above the strike price, the option expires worthless, and you can lose the money you paid for the options contract.
Risk of VIX options:
The prices of VIX options can fluctuate significantly and thus increase the risk for investors.
The VIX is a synthetic value that is calculated on the basis of option prices. Investors who invest in VIX options should therefore be aware of the special features of this asset class.
In some market situations, the VIX and thus also the prices of VIX options may not move in the expected direction. This means that in some cases VIX options may not help to reduce the risk of a portfolio, but rather increase it.
VIX options generally have a term of only a few months and are therefore more suitable for short-term trading.
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View source version on newsdirect.com: https://newsdirect.com/news/use-volatility-in-your-favor-with-robinhood-options-trading-in-april-volatility-index-vix-hit-highest-mark-337548674
Benzinga
COMTEX_453285838/2655/2024-06-03T09:43:17
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Press Release
AI Expert Amol Walvekar Builds First-Ever RAG-Powered, Custom AI for Finance Processes
Anchor, from Adra Technologies, builds the first retrieval-augmented generation to the finance back office built by a product leader who shipped enterprise-grade AI at JP Morgan, WePay, Lead, Bolt, and Insight Data Science.
San Francisco, CA, August 7th, 2026— Amol Walvekar, an AI expert who has spent his career building enterprise-grade machine learning systems, today announced the launch of Anchor’s industry first RAG for finance teams, and custom agents built specifically for finance processes. Anchor by Adra Technologies Inc. enables finance teams to build, operate, and scale AI agents for complex back-office work directly within their ERP, CRM, and data warehouse.

Understanding RAG, Its Enterprise Value, and Proven ROI
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an architectural framework that enhances the functionality of Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external data retrieval mechanisms. Rather than relying solely on static training data or forcing models to guess. The core business value of RAG lies in its ability to deliver secure, highly accurate, and audit-ready outputs across complex structured and unstructured corporate data.
By grounding LLM responses in an organization’s internal datasets—such as contracts, policies, and systems records—RAG dramatically reduces hallucinations, eliminates the risks of stale static knowledge, and maintains strict enterprise-grade compliance without the high expenses of continuous model retraining.
Leading industry implementations and technical benchmarks highlight the significant operational ROI of optimized RAG systems:
- Error Reduction: Advanced semantic filtering has demonstrated the ability to reduce incorrect or partially correct RAG outputs by up to 80% while boosting baseline retrieval accuracy by over 20 percentage points.
- Frontier Accuracy: In standardized end-to-end evaluations like the RAG-QA Arena, optimized systems utilizing fully integrated architectures consistently outperform general frontier models.
- Efficiency Gains: Deep-dive development platforms focused on enterprise AI evaluation loops have successfully accelerated engineering cycles, delivering up to a 10x improvement in model prototyping, validation, and production deployment speeds.
Walvekar’s expertise was forged inside some of the most demanding enterprise AI environments in financial services. At WePay, through its acquisition by JP Morgan, he built enterprise-grade ML for risk and payments systems where a model’s decisions carry real financial consequences and must hold up at bank-level standards of accuracy, auditability, and scale. He continued that work across Lead and Bolt, applying machine learning to payments infrastructure where reliability is non-negotiable. As an AI Fellow at Insight, he built and shipped an abstractive text summarization platform for knowledge workers — early, hands-on work in the language-model techniques that now power Anchor.
“Finance processes have resisted automation because generic AI doesn’t know your chart of accounts, your contracts, your ERP, or your policies,” said Walvekar. “Anchor is different by design: it’s retrieval-augmented and custom to each finance team, grounded in their own systems and documents. That’s how you get the accuracy and reliability of a trained analyst. The model isn’t guessing, it’s retrieving and reasoning over the customer’s actual financial data.”
RAG, purpose-built for the finance back office
Anchor’s retrieval-augmented architecture connects directly to the systems where finance work lives including NetSuite, Salesforce, Workday, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, Snowflake, and more than a dozen other platforms and grounds every agent in the customer’s own data, documents, and processes. Finance teams create custom agents in natural language, with no developer effort, to automate work arising from reconciliations, budget management, sales and marketing spend, commissions, and revenue compliance. The platform is SOC 2 Type II compliant, meeting the highest requirements for data protection and privacy.
The result is AI that behaves the way enterprise AI has to behave: precise, explainable, and dependable at production scale now applied to the finance back office.
Beyond building Adra, Walvekar is an active angel investor and writes on enterprise AI adoption, agentic architectures, and market structure. He holds a graduate degree from Boston University.
About Amol
Amol is the Cofounder of Adra Technologies Inc. is the company behind Anchor, the first RAG-powered, custom AI platform for finance processes. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more at www.getadra.com.
Media Contact: founders@getadra.com
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Press Release
Movement, El Vecino and RISE Partner to Launch First Digital Dollar Wallet for Mexican Remittances
Palo Alto, California, August 7th, 2026, Chainwire
Launch allows Mexican families to send money home from the U.S. instantly via WhatsApp across the largest remittance corridor in the world without requiring a bank account or app download
Global, on-chain payments network Movement has announced a partnership with New Jersey-based Mexico remittance expert El Vecino and on-chain wallet provider RISE to power a digital-dollar service that lets customers hold their own money and send it home in seconds through WhatsApp.
Leveraging El Vecino’s 19 years of experience in US-to-Mexico physical remittances, RISE’s wallet capabilities and LATAM network, and Movement’s access to regulated, sub-second payment rails, the partnership enables stablecoin-settled transfers to be sent to Mexico almost instantly, giving customers a simple way to initiate transfers without opening a bank account or downloading an app.
Rather than having to visit a physical location to initiate every cash transfer, El Vecino customers can now begin the process through the familiar WhatsApp messenger. Funds settle in seconds before recipients cash out through Mexico’s extensive OXXO and Circle K retail networks, or receive funds directly via the country’s SPEI banking system.
Currently, El Vecino processes approx 25,000 transactions per month valued at $70 million annually through remittances, international and domestic bill payments, check cashing, and more – with 85% of transactions heading to Mexico.
The new WhatsApp service will first be trialled among El Vecino’s 20,000 users before being rolled out through RISE’s network to an estimated 800,000 in the second phase. This and future phases will look beyond Mexico to LATAM regions including Guatemala and El Salvador.
Founder of RISE Richard Mas will be appearing live from the New York Stock Exchange on Pulso Del Mercado, one of the region’s most influential news segments, to speak about the partnership on Tuesday, August 11, at 11:30 am EST.
The launch meets the growing demand for accessible cross-border payment solutions across the U.S.- Mexico corridor, which forms the world’s largest remittance route, through which over $62 billion passed in 2024. [Source].
The ability to send money home through a trusted local provider is a financial lifeline for Mexican migrant families, with the Movement-engineered solution streamlining a process that has traditionally entailed cash handling and multi-day settlement times.
Torab Torabi, CEO of on-chain global payments network Movement, says: “For too long, Mexicans have often struggled to send hard-earned money back home. Partnering with El Vecino and RISE will address this imbalance while proving the versatility and reliability of stablecoins as a settlement mechanism. In doing so, we’re also proud to be demonstrating that regulated blockchain infrastructure can modernize one of the world’s busiest remittance corridors.”
Mike Burns, founder of El Vecino added: “El Vecino has been built on the trust brought by face-to-face interaction. Families rely on us because they know we’ll help them support their loved ones back home. The partnership with RISE and Movement allows us to bring that built trust to a remote digital vehicle that provides the same safeguards and surety that money sent will reach home. Technology should make life easier, and that’s exactly what this collaboration achieves.”
Richard Mas, founder of RISE says: “Every year, tens of billions of dollars cross from the United States into Mexico, most of it earned far from home by people the banking system overlooked. El Vecino spent 19 years earning trust at the counter, one household at a time, and we are proud to join Movement in giving those customers access to new, safe and compliant digital solutions.”
Powered by Movement’s access to licensed payment infrastructure, El Vecino’s new WhatsApp service replaces the traditional chain of correspondent banks with blockchain-based settlement while maintaining full regulatory compliance. This model removes the need for pre-funded liquidity and reduces settlement from days to seconds without the hidden costs often associated with legacy cross-border payment rails.
Movement’s globally licensed payment infrastructure, which spans the United States, Canada, and Europe, will provide El Vecino with compliant fiat on- and off-ramps that have historically been difficult for community remittance providers to access.
The collaboration between Movement, El Vecino and RISE demonstrates how established community operators can adopt institutional-grade blockchain payment infrastructure without the complexity of self-development and management. Combining El Vecino’s local relationships with Movement’s access to a regulated settlement network has yielded a model that could potentially be replicated by remittance providers serving immigrant communities worldwide.
About Movement
Movement provides access to globally licensed and regulated blockchain payment infrastructure that enables businesses to move money across borders using compliant stablecoin settlement rails. Its payment network offers licensed access across the United States, Canada, and Europe, helping financial institutions and payment providers deliver fast, low-cost international transfers without relying on traditional correspondent banking networks. https://www.movementnetwork.xyz/
About El Vecino
El Vecino is a trusted community financial services provider serving Mexican communities across New Jersey. Processing more than $70 million in annual remittance volume for over 20,000 customers, the company offers money transfer and financial services designed to help families maintain strong economic connections across the U.S.-Mexico border. Learn more at https://www.linkedin.com/company/el-vecino-franquicias/
About RISE
RISE is a self-custody digital dollar wallet that lets customers hold and transfer USD-backed digital dollars while keeping direct control of their own funds. Offering an alternative to slow, high-cost, and often inaccessible banking rails, RISE customers can open a dollar account inside WhatsApp, hold their balance in USD-backed digital dollars that resist local inflation, and send money across borders in seconds for a flat fee. Learn more at https://risefinance.xyz.
Press Contact:
Rebecca Jones
rebecca.jones@moveindustries.xyz
Contact
Head of Communications
Rebecca Jones
Move Industries
rebecca.jones@moveindustries.xyz
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Press Release
Carbon Launches TradFi-Native On-Chain Derivatives Venue With 950+ Markets in One Account
Road Town, British Virgin Islands, August 7th, 2026, Chainwire
250+ TradFi markets join Carbon’s 530+ crypto perpetuals & 150 24/7 RWAs in one venue. Wall Street depth at listing, stable overnight rates, and on-chain settlement.
Carbon, the on-chain prime broker for global markets, today opened public trading on 250+ Carbon TradFi markets spanning equities, indices, forex, and commodities. Each position is hedged 1:1 at regulated TradFi venues, making Carbon the largest TradFi-native on-chain derivatives venue. Alongside 530+ crypto perpetuals and 150 24/7 RWAs, total tradeable instruments now exceed 950 in one account.
Carbon TradFi is Carbon’s own on-chain instrument. A trader opens a position on-chain, in their own wallet, and Carbon’s solver architecture hedges it 1:1 at a regulated broker off-chain. The trader never leaves self-custody, and the price and depth they receive are the underlying market’s, not bootstrapped on-chain order books.
That structure removes the cold-start problem that has constrained real-world assets on-chain. Every Carbon TradFi market opens at full institutional depth on its first day, because the depth is inherited rather than manufactured. There is no per-market incentive program to run and no waiting period while liquidity accumulates.
Carbon now offers traders both in one account. Its 150 24/7 real-world markets trade around the clock, for traders who want access at any hour. Its 250+ Carbon TradFi markets track market hours with carry prices from the underlying, for traders who want institutional depth and predictable holding costs. Roughly 30 assets are live as both, letting a trader hold one against the other and capture the difference between the two financing rates without leaving the account.
The global market Carbon connects to is substantial. TradFi clears over $1.5 trillion daily in CFDs across thousands of markets, liquidity that until now had no direct route on-chain.
Carbon TradFi coverage at launch:
- 200 stocks across US, EU, and Asia markets
- 62 forex pairs
- 12 indices
- 8 commodities
Carbon can list a trending name within the same week it begins moving in Seoul, Tokyo, or Hong Kong, a cadence order-book venues cannot match because they lack the off-chain rails to stand up a new market that quickly. A further 150 listings are scheduled.
The launch also opens the Carbon Liquidity Provider (CLP) vault to public deposits. The CLP is a delta-neutral yield product: it funds the hedge behind trader flow rather than taking directional positions, earning from the difference between on-chain demand and off-chain liquidity. Modeled APY is illustrative and ranges from 20.3% at launch utilization to 57.1% at maturity, depending on flow and capital utilization.
“Traders have had to choose between the assets they want and the execution they need. Carbon ends that trade-off. Every position is hedged into the deepest liquidity in the world and settles in the trader’s own wallet, with 950+ markets in a single account. This is what global markets look like when they finally arrive on-chain properly.” – Levy, Co-founder and CEO of Carbon
“One of the biggest challenges for bringing traditional financial assets onchain has been delivering deep liquidity. Carbon is operating an architecture that connects onchain trading with established market infrastructure while preserving self-custody. We want Arbitrum to be home to teams building this next generation of financial infrastructure” – David Garcia, Ecosystem Lead at Arbitrum Foundation
About Carbon
Carbon is the on-chain prime broker for global markets, combining crypto perpetuals and Carbon TradFi in one venue. Carbon’s solver architecture connects on-chain traders to institutional liquidity through bilateral 1:1 hedging, delivering Wall Street-grade depth and stable carry with on-chain settlement and self-custody. Live since 2023, Carbon has processed $20B+ in cumulative trading volume across 36K+ unique traders. Carbon operates on Arbitrum. Users can learn more at carbon.inc.
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Carbon
rens@carbon.inc
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Disclaimer: The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Digi Observer journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.
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