Charles Schwab is edging closer to two trends reshaping the retail trading landscape: prediction markets and crypto trading — but with caution.
Speaking on the company’s first-quarter earnings call, CEO Rick Wurster said Schwab “will likely have prediction markets” at some point, but drew a clear line between financial event contracts and wagers on sports, politics or pop culture. “It’s not at the top of our clients’ list,” he added, warning that the track record for gamblers is poor and that the firm will “stay away from gambling” if it launches such products.
Why it matters
- With $11.8 trillion in client assets, Charles Schwab’s eventual embrace of prediction markets would be a big signal that mainstream Wall Street firms are legitimizing a corner of finance long seen as niche or regulatory gray.
- Other incumbents are already moving: Cboe is preparing event contracts tied to financial outcomes using traditional market infrastructure, and Nasdaq recently filed with the SEC to offer options-style yes-or-no contracts on specific events.
How prediction markets are showing up elsewhere
- Retail platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase have integrated prediction-market access (often via Kalshi), making these wagers a mainstream retail product.
- On Kalshi, sports wagers recently made up about 78% of the platform’s volume (roughly $2.7 billion in the referenced week), according to a Dune dashboard — underscoring that much of the activity today is entertainment-oriented rather than purely financial hedging.
Schwab’s stance and next steps
- Wurster framed potential Schwab offerings as focused on financial events (e.g., inflation readings, corporate outcomes) rather than pop-culture betting, and stressed the firm won’t rush to market.
- A Schwab spokesperson told Decrypt there’s nothing more to share beyond Wurster’s comments.
Crypto rollout: Bitcoin and Ethereum trading coming soon
- Separately, Schwab said it will begin offering trading in Bitcoin and Ethereum “in the coming weeks,” positioning its fee of 0.75% per trade as “among the lowest in the industry.”
- Schwab — which posted a record 9.9 million trades in Q1 — also plans to expand its crypto feature set over time, adding deposit and withdrawal capability for digital assets and broadening token support to match features investors already see on Robinhood and Coinbase.
Bottom line: Schwab is signaling interest in both prediction markets and crypto, but plans to proceed deliberately — favoring regulated, financially focused products over gambling-style offerings, while bringing mainstream brokerage scale to digital-asset access.
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