Digital Wealth & Robo-Advisory

The Canary Staked TRX ETF, trading on Nasdaq under the ticker TRXS, has launched as one of the first U.S.-listed exchange-traded funds designed to hold TRON's TRX token directly and pass through on-chain staking rewards, giving investors a way to gain single-asset crypto exposure inside a brokerage or IRA account without opening a crypto exchange account or managing self-custody. The fund's return engine combines TRX spot price appreciation with a staking reward stream earned by delegating a portion of holdings to validators on the TRON network, though that reward stream is reduced by the fund's expense ratio before reaching shareholders. With only 7 trading days of history and a settled close of $24.75 on September 17, 2026, TRXS is too young for a track record to matter, and the fund is positioned as a satellite holding sized at low single-digit weight at most within a diversified portfolio. Because the fund's operating fee is subtracted from staking rewards, TRXS will structurally deliver slightly less yield than buying and staking TRX directly, a tradeoff the fund offers in exchange for convenience and account eligibility. The fund also carries concentration and governance risk tied to TRON founder Justin Sun, whose active role in the network's development means the token faces headline risk that broader multi-asset crypto ETFs naturally dilute, and its tax treatment of pass-through staking distributions remains unsettled.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's Sept. 17 Innovation Exemption creates a five-year, conditional pathway for certain tokenized U.S. stocks to trade on blockchain-based Tokenized Securities Venues, a framework that could benefit Robinhood Markets. The exemption permits trading through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools, but requires tokenized shares to give holders the same rights and privileges as conventional shares, including dividends and voting rights, while issuers can block third-party tokenization by objecting within 30 days of receiving notice from the trading venue. Robinhood cannot simply bring its existing Stock Tokens to the United States, since the company describes them as tokenized debt securities backed 1:1 by underlying shares that provide economic exposure rather than legal or beneficial ownership and are unavailable to U.S. residents. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has said the company plans to add one-for-one share redemption and voting rights after AMC CEO Adam Aron criticized the Stock Tokens for lacking traditional shareholder rights, though the SEC's allowance for issuer objections diverges from Tenev's stance. Coinbase Global is the most direct rival given its U.S. stock-trading business and international tokenized-equity efforts, while Intercontinental Exchange is developing a 24/7 digital venue for tokenized equities through the NYSE. Robinhood's first-half 2026 revenues climbed 24% year over year to $2.38 billion, earnings rose 23% to $1.00, and the company ended August with 28.6 million funded customers and $384 billion in total platform assets, up 26% year over year.

Equitable Holdings added the industry's first bitcoin-linked investment option to a registered index-linked annuity on September 2, tracking the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF through a new SCS Premier option. The bitcoin option offers one-year segments with buffers of 10%, 15%, 20% and 40%, and allocations are generally capped at 25% of contract value, giving clients defined protection rather than open-ended exposure. The same update added Optimal Mix Segments, which spread money across multiple indices and weight the best performers at maturity, plus Dual Direction Downside Advantage segments that can turn a decline within the buffer into a gain worth twice the size of that drop. The launch sits on top of a business that is already growing: in the second quarter of 2026, Equitable posted net inflows of $1.7 billion in Retirement, $2.0 billion in Wealth Management and $0.8 billion in Asset Management, pushing total assets under management and administration to a record $1.2 trillion, up 10% from a year earlier, while returning $449 million to shareholders and staying on track for a 60% to 70% payout ratio in 2026. The headline growth hides a rockier bottom line, with a GAAP net loss of $453 million, or $1.68 per share, for the second quarter of 2026 even as non-GAAP operating earnings came in positive at $488 million, and book value per common share of negative $6.79 once accumulated other comprehensive income is included. The pending merger with Corebridge Financial, approved by shareholders on July 30, still needs regulatory sign-off before it can close, leaving the promised earnings boost of more than 10% to earnings per share on a run-rate basis by year-end 2028 dependent on approvals still to come.

24/7 Wall St. has issued a BUY rating on Coinbase with a 12-month price target of $212.94, implying 23.73% upside from a current price of $172.11, even as the stock sits 47.37% below its 52-week high. The call follows a rough second quarter in which revenue of $1.22 billion fell 18.5% year over year and missed consensus by 5.36%, with GAAP EPS of -$1.36, as total crypto spot trading volume dropped 25% quarter over quarter. The bull case rests on diversification: subscription and services reached 48% of net revenue in Q2, prediction markets already exceed $100 million in annualized revenue, average USDC held on platform hit an all-time high of $20 billion, and Base has processed roughly $32 trillion in trailing 12-month stablecoin transfer volume, with management projecting the stablecoin market will grow tenfold from $300 billion today to $3 trillion by 2030. The bear case is equally blunt: consumer transaction revenue fell 20% year over year and institutional dropped 26%, assets on platform slid to $246 billion from $294 billion, and the FY2026 EPS estimate has collapsed from $0.8953 ninety days ago to -$1.9697 today on 13 downward revisions in the past 30 days. For comparison, Robinhood posted Q2 2026 revenue up 32% year over year to $1.31 billion and carries an $87 billion market cap versus Coinbase's $38 billion, while CME Group reported $1.71 billion in quarterly revenue at a $99 billion market cap. 24/7 Wall St.'s bull scenario points to $361.40, while its bear scenario lands at $186.62, still above the current price.

Apex Fintech Solutions has entered a digital wealth alliance with FusionIQ, a provider of cloud-based digital wealth management technology. The partnership combines Apex's clearing, custody and brokerage infrastructure with FusionIQ's end-to-end digital wealth platform, giving financial institutions a faster, more integrated route to launching and scaling modern investing experiences. Mutual clients will be able to combine Apex's brokerage, custody and clearing capabilities with FusionIQ's platform, including digital advice, self-directed investing, digital model marketplace and fin-TAMP capabilities, within a single technology stack. Apex Fintech Solutions CEO Bill Capuzzi said firms need backend systems that are fast, flexible and secure, while FusionIQ CEO Eric Noll said the combination removes friction from the integration process. The combined offering is intended to reduce integration complexity and shorten time-to-market for banks, credit unions, registered investment advisors, broker-dealers and other institutions modernising their wealth management services. In June, FusionIQ acquired Marstone, a US-based digital wealth technology company, bringing together two platforms serving banks, credit unions, wealth managers and their customers.

24/7 Wall St. has set a $7.77 price target on Webull with a hold rating and 90% confidence, implying 10.25% downside from the current price of $8.66. The call follows a mixed stretch in which Webull's Q3 2026 revenue reached $198.83 million, up 26.7% year over year but missing consensus by 8.97%, with GAAP diluted EPS of $0.04 falling short of the $0.065 estimate, while the prior Q2 quarter delivered record DARTs of 1.6 million, up 62% year over year, and customer assets of $28.5 billion, up 79%. CEO Anthony Denier called the SEC's elimination of the Pattern Day Trader rule on June 4, 2026 the company's defining event for the quarter, and Q2 adjusted operating profit jumped 169% to $62.6 million. The bear case rests on an 88.09% effective tax rate, negative operating cash flow of $250.9 million in the first half of 2026, revenue concentration with two counterparties at 19% and 11%, and $50 million of promissory notes due April 2027, with a bear-case target of $6.65. Webull's $3.95 billion market cap remains far below Robinhood's roughly $87.3 billion, and its forward P/E of 173 looks aggressive next to Interactive Brokers and Charles Schwab, though the $100 million Pi Securities deal in Thailand, which closed on August 31, 2026, targets THB 200 billion in assets under management and international funded accounts have reached 810,000.

Coinbase Global shares rose 1% to $174 in early Wednesday trading even after the U.S. Senate rejected cloture on the Clarity Act, the digital-asset market structure bill, by a tally of 50 in favor and 49 against, short of the 60 votes needed to advance. Four Republican senators joined Democrats in voting against the measure, which the president had publicly backed and which the crypto industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying to pass. Strategy stock climbed 1% to $130.66 and Robinhood Markets rose 0.57% to $111.08, with both names having already priced in a defeat before the vote. The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF slipped 0.2% to $43.03 while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust gained 0.35% to $760.03, leaving the Bitcoin proxy lower even as crypto equities and the broad tape traded green. With Congress heading toward recess ahead of the midterms, regulatory momentum for the sector may shift from legislation to actions by the SEC and the CFTC, while the next catalysts for Strategy and Robinhood run through Bitcoin's price and the Federal Reserve decision later today.

TMBThanachart Bank, or TTB, has launched its "My Wealth" service through the ttb touch application, partnering with Webull to let customers invest in US stocks and ETFs. Kanokwan Phetpisitchot, Head of the Bank Transaction Products and Financial Wealth Management Group at TTB, said Thais hold deposits equal to 57% of their financial assets, while investment assets account for only 23%, below the global average of 45% and the US figure of 59%. Naris Aruksakulwong, Head of the Strategy and Digital Group at TTB, said the money management market offers three main options. Mobile banking has roughly 150 million accounts in total and combined AUM of about 15 to 16 trillion baht. Retail securities trading accounts in the Thai stock market number fewer than 5 million, with combined AUM of only 3.4 trillion baht. Alternative investment platforms have about 3 million users and combined AUM of only 300 billion baht. In the past quarter, the bank's investment income grew at a double-digit rate year on year, driven by a policy interest rate of about 1%, which has set off a flow of funds from deposit accounts into investment accounts. TTB sees an opportunity in the Mass Affluent segment, or MAF, with assets of under 1 million baht, which currently has a base of about 6,000 customers and combined AUM of more than 280 billion baht. The bank expects at least 50% of its 600,000-strong customer base to start using "My Wealth". Chonladech Khemarattana, Chief Executive Officer of Webull Securities (Thailand) Company Limited, or Webull, said Thai investors are increasingly interested in global investing, especially in diversifying their portfolios into overseas markets and leading global companies in technology and innovation, with the US market remaining one of the key markets drawing interest from investors worldwide.

Anthropic launched "Claude for Financial Advisors," a suite of tools for financial advisors, on Monday, September 14, connecting the Claude chatbot to the investment data analytics and wealth management software of leading firms including BlackRock, Charles Schwab, and Addepar. The toolset helps advisors prepare information ahead of client meetings, review investment portfolios, and follow up on tasks after meetings. It also connects to the data and software of Envestnet, iCapital, Orion, Wealthbox, Wealth.com, and SS&C. The launch comes just days after OpenAI introduced a version of ChatGPT for the financial sector aimed at investment bankers and securities analysts, with tools for financial research, building financial models, and preparing client presentations. This expansion into the financial services sector builds on tools Anthropic has developed from its Claude AI model to support investment research, portfolio analysis, financial modeling, and client documentation. Meanwhile, the speed and cost of AI development are drawing increasing scrutiny, with industry leaders beginning to question whether companies can continue to bear costs at this level and how quickly the technology should advance, amid concerns about misuse of AI.

Pave Finance, a New York-based artificial-intelligence backed trading and portfolio management platform for financial advisors, has raised more than $15 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round at a $100 million valuation. The round included investment from advisory firms, former executive officers and board members of financial services firms, and company insiders, and will support the expansion of Pave's market-facing and engineering teams. It follows a $14 million seed financing round for the firm in 2025. Pave was founded in 2021 by Pascal Cevaer-Corey, a former McKinsey consultant, and was later joined by Peter Corey, a former hedge fund manager, and Stephen Evans, a quantitative portfolio manager; the firm currently represents $130 billion in assets across more than 300,000 accounts. CEO Christopher Ainsworth, who took the role in December 2022 after serving as a managing director in Deutsche Bank's private wealth division, said advisory businesses must find efficient ways to manage a larger volume of clients who are simultaneously demanding greater personalization in their portfolios.

Robinhood Markets reported resilient customer and asset growth in its August 2026 operating metrics, though trading activity across products remained mixed. Funded customers reached 28.6 million, up about 120,000 from July and 1.9 million year over year, while total platform assets as of Aug. 31, 2026 jumped 8% sequentially and 26% year over year to $383.7 billion. Net deposits totaled $4 billion, down from $5.6 billion in July and $4.8 billion in August 2025. Equity notional volumes rose 1% month over month and surged 68% year over year to $335.4 billion, with average daily volumes rising 6% sequentially to $16 billion, and crypto notional volumes climbed 61% from July to $17.5 billion, though they remained 38% below the prior-year level. Options contracts traded declined 10% sequentially to 292.5 million despite increasing 50% year over year, event contracts fell 23% from July to 4.7 billion, and margin balances rose 4% sequentially and 72% year over year to $21.5 billion. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Robinhood's 2026 earnings suggests a year-over-year increase of 2.9%, with earnings expected to jump 33% next year, and estimates for 2026 and 2027 were revised higher in the past week to $2.11 and $2.81 per share, respectively.

Robinhood Markets is pursuing a strategy centered on expanding access to financial asset ownership, with priorities spanning active trading, broader consumer financial services and international infrastructure, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Vlad Tenev said during a discussion hosted by Goldman Sachs. Tenev reiterated the company's longer-term goal for half of its revenue to come from outside the U.S. and half from institutional customers, and said tokenization could accelerate progress toward those targets. Robinhood Chain, the company's tokenization platform, offers roughly 200 tokenized U.S. stocks, called stock tokens, that Tenev said are backed one-to-one and available in more than 120 countries outside the U.S., with additional assets planned. He said recent activity on the chain has included billions of dollars of daily trading volume and gross revenue that reached as high as $6 million in a single day, though he declined to annualize that figure. Tenev also described wealth management as an expanding opportunity, pointing to managed accounts through Robinhood Strategies, human advice through TradePMR, banking products, credit cards and retirement accounts, and said the company expects more than $100 trillion in wealth to change hands from older generations to younger generations over coming decades. Robinhood is serving as the initial broker and trustee for Trump Accounts, which he described as accounts intended to allow children to invest in an S&P 500 exchange-traded fund, with accounts for children born in 2025 receiving a $1,000 contribution from the U.S. Treasury. The company is also broadening its agentic-trading tools, which let artificial-intelligence agents connect to a customer's Robinhood account through an interface known as the Robinhood MCP, and plans to announce additional active-trader products at an event in Houston later in the month.

Binance's research division published an analytical report on tokenized equities on the 11th, noting that the market is entering an active on-chain phase. The market capitalization of active tokenized equities rose from 965 million dollars in early 2026 to about 4 billion dollars as of September 9th, while monthly trading volume surged from 237 million dollars in January to 7.9 billion dollars in August. The turnover ratio of monthly trading volume to active market capitalization climbed from 0.23 times in January to 2.14 times in August, reaching 3.32 times in July. Growth drivers have shifted from issuance to distribution infrastructure, with the combined trading volume share of Binance's tokenized equity platform bStocks and the investment app Robinhood expanding from 0.8% in June to 82.3% in August and 87.8% in September. Active total value locked in tokenized equity DeFi rose 1,242% from 21.6 million dollars at the start of the year to 289.1 million dollars as of September 9th, broken down into liquidity pools at 65.4%, lending at 28.1%, yield tokenization at 5.7%, and other at 0.8%, with BNB Chain, Robinhood Chain, and Solana accounting for 90% of market share. The report expressed the view that the competitive focus is shifting from issuance competition to distribution and utility competition.

Pornanong Busaratrakul, Secretary-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission, disclosed that the Thailand Individual Savings Account project, or TISA, has a clearer main direction after the relevant agencies aligned on their approach. The next step is to drive forward the details and prepare systems so that operators can support the service. Key details, especially the investment cap that will receive tax benefits, still await consideration by the Ministry of Finance, as they involve tax policy and the impact on government revenue. The preliminary structure of TISA is one account supporting two savings objectives. The first part is retirement savings, with the idea of bringing existing retirement products under the same structure, such as provident funds, retirement mutual funds, the Government Pension Fund, and annuity insurance, and there is an idea to add an option for direct investment if investors have the knowledge and can accept appropriate risk. The second part is long-term investment that is exempt from tax on returns such as interest and dividends, through core products such as stocks, bonds, and debt instruments, which must be invested through the project's account or system to link data and verify the use of tax privileges. On expanding the investor base, Thailand currently has more than 7 million stock trading accounts, but after removing duplicate accounts, about 5 million investors remain, while investors who are active over a period of about 6 months number fewer than 1 million, compared with a population of more than 60 million. On system readiness, the SEC is working with operators, building on the system structure that already supports existing retirement products, and has not required that every operator be ready to provide the service at the same time. Service providers that are ready can join first.

Webull Corporation announced the completion of its acquisition of Pi Securities in Thailand, targeting a combined asset under management of THB 200 billion. The deal, approved by Thailand's SEC, involved Webull purchasing approximately 99.36% of Pi Securities for an aggregate consideration of about US$100 million, including a 90.98% stake from Country Group Holdings for US$90 million and an additional 8.38% from another shareholder for US$10 million. Webull Thailand's CEO highlighted synergies in research, technology, and AI, while the company plans to expand wealth management and leverage partnerships, including with a Thai bank and TrueMoney Mini App. Initially, both firms will operate independently under their respective brands.

Nasdaq has announced the acquisition of Dasseti to expand AI-driven capabilities within its eVestment platform and deepen its coverage of private markets. The deal is intended to help asset managers and institutional investors streamline data collection and due diligence workflows. In a separate move, Nasdaq Verafin entered a new partnership with Alloy focused on using data and AI to improve fraud risk management for banks and other financial institutions. These actions highlight Nasdaq's focus on technology solutions that support both institutional investment workflows and financial crime prevention.

LTMH has revealed that its subsidiary, securities company WealthX, is currently studying the feasibility of expanding its business to cover securities brokerage services, in order to support the group's WealthTech ecosystem. The study aims to increase the diversity of investment products, accommodate future changes in investment and tax regulations, and drive long-term growth. WealthX will consider low-cost business models, building on its existing systems and user base, while also exploring partnerships with business allies. However, this is still in the study phase, with no binding commitments, and there is no certainty that it will proceed. If the study yields clear results, it will be presented to the board for approval, and the company will comply with relevant regulations, including obtaining licenses from regulatory authorities before commencing the business.

Crypto firms, asset managers, market makers, and consumer advocates submitted competing proposals to the SEC for regulating novel exchange-traded products, including crypto, private assets, event contracts, and leveraged strategies. The Crypto Council for Innovation urged the SEC to extend regulatory efficiencies available to ETFs under the Investment Company Act of 1940 to other ETPs, while Andreessen Horowitz advised against treating all novel ETFs as a single category and called for closer coordination between fund-registration and exchange-listing reviews. Grayscale opposed new portfolio restrictions for digital-asset products, Charles Schwab proposed a public filing period of at least 75 days, and Chainalysis recommended real-time surveillance on public blockchains. Prediction market Kalshi argued that event contracts should remain eligible for registered funds, but consumer group Public Citizen warned that such ETFs would place gambling-like products in a vehicle retail investors trust for long-term investing. The SEC must now decide whether these products need a common framework or separate rules based on their structures and risks.