Is HOOD a crypto proxy? Daily-return correlation with COIN vs SPY (last ~36 months)
The key question here: does the market treat Robinhood (HOOD) more like a crypto play or a broad-market broker? I compared close-to-close daily returns for HOOD against Coinbase (COIN) and the S&P ETF (SPY) over roughly the last 36 months (751 overlapping trading days). HOOD’s Pearson r is higher with COIN (0.677) than with SPY (0.614); the raw gap is 0.063 with a bootstrap 95% CI that spans −0.001 to 0.134, so the edge is real but modest.
Regression tests reinforce the lean: COIN alone explains more of HOOD’s daily variance than SPY does, and adding COIN to a SPY model raises R² more than the reverse. The evidence points to a noticeable crypto/retail tilt in HOOD’s pricing, but it’s suggestive rather than definitive—details and time-varying behavior are shown in the full analysis below.
For HOOD over the past ~3 years, is Robinhood really a crypto proxy wearing a brokerage badge — is its daily-return correlation with COIN meaningfully tighter than with the broad market (SPY)? Thesis: HOOD's daily returns track COIN far more closely than they track SPY, so the market prices Robinhood as a bet on crypto/retail speculation rather than a diversified broker.
How this was measured
Minute bars for HOOD, COIN, and SPY were resampled to daily closes; close-to-close percent returns were computed and aligned on overlapping trading days within the last 36 months. We measured full-sample Pearson and Spearman correlations of HOOD with COIN and with SPY, drew a 60-day rolling correlation chart, and estimated the difference in Pearson correlations with a circular block bootstrap (B=1000, block=5 trading days) to form a 95% CI. To separate shared market exposure, we also ran OLS regressions: HOOD on COIN, HOOD on SPY, and HOOD on both together to compare betas and R² (including incremental R² when adding one predictor beyond the other).
The key numbers
Reading the numbers
Across 751 overlapping trading days, HOOD's daily returns correlate a bit more with COIN (Pearson r = 0.6767) than with SPY (r = 0.6139). That r gap is 0.0628 but the bootstrap 95% CI (−0.00085 to 0.13387) includes zero, so the difference isn't statistically decisive.
The charts
The 60-day rolling Pearson lines show HOOD–COIN consistently higher than HOOD–SPY: HOOD–COIN averages 0.6764 (first 0.6512, last 0.7301) while HOOD–SPY averages 0.5556 (first 0.5459, last 0.5146). Look at the end of the series — recent windows have HOOD tracking COIN around 0.73 versus SPY around 0.51, indicating tighter crypto co-movement lately. The ranges (COIN min 0.3763/max 0.8949; SPY min 0.1971/max 0.8892) show there are intermittent episodes of much wider divergence.
The full-sample bars make the central point: Pearson r is 0.677 for HOOD–COIN versus 0.614 for HOOD–SPY, and Spearman rho is 0.706 versus 0.546, so both linear and rank correlations are stronger with COIN (the rank gap is ~0.160). That lines up with R²: HOOD~COIN = 0.4579 (45.8%) versus HOOD~SPY = 0.3769 (37.7%), and HOOD~COIN+SPY = 0.5447. The incremental R² of COIN given SPY is 0.1679, meaning COIN adds substantial explanatory power beyond SPY even if the bare r difference wasn't judged statistically clear.
OLS regression summary (daily returns)
| model | beta_COIN | beta_SPY | R2 | n | p_COIN | p_SPY |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOOD ~ COIN | 0.6099 | 0.4579 | 751 | 0 | ||
| HOOD ~ SPY | 2.8036 | 0.3769 | 751 | 0 | ||
| HOOD ~ COIN + SPY | 0.4391 | 1.6001 | 0.5447 | 751 | 0 | 0 |
The takeaway
Lean yes — over the last ~36 months HOOD moves more like COIN than like SPY, but the edge is modest and not ironclad. Pearson correlations are 0.677 with COIN versus 0.614 with SPY (Spearman 0.706 vs 0.546) across 751 overlapping trading days. The raw gap in Pearson r is 0.063, but the bootstrap 95% CI is [-0.001, 0.134], so the difference could be zero; still, each pairwise correlation is highly significant (p≈0), i.e., not random. Regressions back this up: COIN alone explains 45.8% of HOOD’s daily-return variance vs 37.7% for SPY, and adding COIN on top of SPY raises R2 by 0.168 compared with only +0.087 when adding SPY on top of COIN — COIN gives more incremental explanatory power. Practical takeaway: the market prices a noticeable crypto/retail tilt into HOOD (a meaningful lean), but this is suggestive rather than conclusive and sensitive to time windows and regime shifts seen in the rolling correlations.
The fine print
- Window is the most recent ~36 months (751 days); results can change with a different sample.
- These are descriptive correlations, not causal exposures — spikes or idiosyncratic events can dominate.
- Bootstrap CI used circular blocks (block=5); different block lengths change the CI width.
- Daily-return OLS assumptions (independence, homoskedasticity) are violated in practice; R2/p-values are first-order summaries.