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· Posted on
February 21, 2024

Robinhood goes public and gets record fine - all in a week's work

Can you imagine a busier week than receiving a record fine and launching your IPO? Robinhood can

What's the key learning?

  • People enjoy investing in meme and penny stocks, even if it's costly
  • Robinhood wants to "democratise" trading for everyone - unfortunately this includes people who don't have any experience investing money.
  • Regulators have become concerned about Robinhood encouraging uneducated people to invest.

WHAT IS GOING ON WITH ROBINHOOD?

Robinhood, the company that aims to democratise finance for everyone, has announced it will go public over the coming months.

Robinhood will aim to raise USD $100 million when it goes public and start trading under the ticker symbol “HOOD”.

The IPO will allow Robinhood users to invest in Robinhood stock through the Robinhood app. Strong inception vibes.

This comes at a very interesting moment for Robinhood - it just received USD $70m fine from financial regulators for misleading millions of customers and for mishandling an outage in March (during meme-stock szn) last year.

So, what's the key learning?

Financial markets used to be a place for boring and low-touch 'index funds' or 'blue chip' shares (think: Telstra, ANZ, Rio Tinto).

Robinhood shows how the tide has turned. People are getting bored of boring investing - they want to have some fun with meme stocks and penny stocks. And they're even willing to lose money for it.

Robinhood wants everyone to be able to trade - including inexperienced traders who make high-risk trades, without properly educating them.

US regulators have fired their first shot - just before the Robinhood IPO.

There’s no doubt about it.. Robinhood will be keen to see the back of this one, and move forward.

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