Robinhood Eyes IRAs For US Investors; Made Its IPO Event Public

Robinhood, the popular brokerage among retail traders, has opened its IPO ambitions with a roadshow where it pitched itself to all investors, Bloomberg writes.

Usually, these kinds of events are presented only to hedge funds and other institutions.

But Robinhood made its presentation available for anyone to watch, in what Bloomberg writes is an “unusual” move.

In doing so, the company seems to be inviting any investors, even the small-time retail ones which populate its own service daily.

Meanwhile, the company has also said it’s thinking about debuting retirement accounts for U.S. customers, Reuters writes.

CEO and cofounder Vlad Tenev has said the idea is to expand the company’s services.

“We are interested in building more account types, including IRAs and Roth IRAs, we’ve been hearing that a lot from our customers. We want to make first-time investors into long-term investors,” Tenev said in response to an investor question at a recent webcast on Saturday (July 24).

Currently, Robinhood has around 18 million funded investment accounts on its platform. By adding retirement accounts, Reuters writes that the company could dig into a huge market in need of things like individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and Roth IRAs, which offer tax advantages to people saving for retirement.

Reuters writes that the amount of money Americans have in IRAs has hit $12.6 trillion, which is a boost of 2.8 percent from last December.

Tenev said in the webcast that many of Robinhood’s customers are buy-and-hold, in contrast to the quick flips many users go to Robinhood for. IRAs are primarily attractive to longer-term investors.

The S-1 Robinhood filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission showed that the platform has been able to draw in both younger investors as well as those interested in cryptocurrencies. As of March 31, 2021, the company said there were 18 million net cumulative funded accounts on the platform — an increase of 151 percent from last year.