Stock for Robinhood was up over 50 percent on Wednesday (August 4), with its close being $70.39 — a near-doubling of the initial $38 price it started at in July.
That’s up from the previous close of $46.80 and opening at $54.45 as of the beginning of the day Wednesday. In after-hours trading, the stock hovered around $66.10.
That means the popular online broker has changed course from when it first went public in July. At that time, PYMNTS reports that the broker was down over eight percent on its first day. The company had priced at the lower range of its IPO. Robinhood opened trading by selling 55 million shares at its $38 to $42 price range.
But PYMNTS wrote at the end of July that the company was even then one of the more valued U.S. firms to date on the list, with its estimated valuation of $31.8 billion.
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Robinhood, which was established in 2013, was an unusual case for an IPO, being that it made money in 2020, generating a new income of $7.45 million on net revenue of $959 million. The company’s approach to free trading, which favored younger users dabbling in day trading, ended up causing the brokerage industry to ditch its previous approach of commissions for retail trading.
Robinhood also broke the mold in its IPO by making between 20 and 35 percent of its shares available for its own users, which is not a common way to go about it.
The company, according to the report, had 21.3 million monthly active users as of the last count. That’s a major boost from the 11.7 million the company had at the end of December.
PYMNTS also wrote that Robinhood had shifted the stage for investors, introducing an easy way for the younger users to dabble in the activities of trading.
That especially came to a head in early 2021 as Reddit users on the Robinhood platform began to rally around “meme stocks,” like AMC, GameStop and others, as a way to fly in the face of big hedge funds, betting those would fail.
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