Robinhood is now a stonk

Update: Trading of Robinhood shares has been halted due to volatility. The company’s stock paused at $65.60 on Robinhood itself. Yahoo Finance has a higher $77.03 price on the company’s equity, up a stunning 64.59% today. Things are fluid, but Robinhood may have been halted and then rose again when it resumed trading. Stonks indeed.

Shares of Robinhood, an investing-focused consumer fintech company, soared this morning in pre-market trading. The stonk phenomenon, which helped propel minor companies like GameStop and AMC earlier this year, appears to be impacting Robinhood’s own stock; that much GameStop and AMC trading took place on Robinhood’s platform during stonk-fever is irony not lost on this publication.

Here’s what things look like this morning, per Yahoo Finance:

Recall that Robinhood went public at $38 per share, the low end of its range, and sank in its early trading sessions to below its IPO price. Now, it’s worth $54 per share.

Cool.

Normally we’d crack a joke and close this small news item here, but with Robinhood’s IPO featuring a unique twist on the traditional public offering, we have to do a bit more work. When it went public, Robinhood reserved a chunk of its equity for purchase by its own users. The impact of this was that more retail investors likely owned Robinhood equity at the start of its trading life than would be normal with a traditional IPO.

One hypothesis regarding Robinhood’s somewhat slack early trading performance was that early retail demand for its shares was sated by its effort to allow its users to buy stock in its shares, leading to a less-skewed supply/demand curve when it debuted.

Things have changed. What’s going on? Last week, an analyst put a $65 per share price target on the stock. And there are a handful of other ratings to chew on. But the wild swing in the price of Robinhood today appears from our vantage point to be another stonk moment. The stock is being traded like a short-squeeze, even if some market participants are skeptical of the idea due to what they view as a limited short interest in the company.

Checking the Robinhood IR page, there’s no news. Robinhood did not recently report earnings. And the company’s recent 606 filings that deal with PFOF incomes seemed to match up with expectations in revenue terms regarding what the company detailed in its Q2 2021 flash numbers. Perhaps there was more crypto in there than expected, but nothing truly wild.

It appears that Robinhood is simply going up because it is. This happens in 2021; we just have to get used to it.

But what matters most for our purposes is that Robinhood’s decision to sell some IPO stock to its users did not manage to create so much float for the now-public unicorn to diminish weird trading. You can go public in an unusual manner and still catch a stonk wave. Now we know.