Should you invest in Robinhood’s IPO?

• Robinhood Markets, Inc. filed its IPO prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday (01 July 2021)
• The platform is reportedly planning to allocate up to 35% of IPO shares to existing users
• The move comes just as the company launched its 'IPO Access' service
• Market observers pointed out a few potential risks relating to the company’s recent financials
• Open a live or demo account with us to start today.

Robinhood IPO: What’s the latest?

Robinhood is reportedly planning to set aside between 20% and 35% of its upcoming IPO shares through its own platform to existing customers.

This allocation is much larger than the typical IPO, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The move also looks to be on brand for the online brokerage, which prides itself on ‘democratising finance for all’.

In line with this mission statement, the company recently began to promote a new service called 'IPO Access'. The service seeks to make IPOs, which have traditionally been reserved for institutional investors, more accessible to retail traders.

IPO Access will allow registered users to buy into shares of companies at launch prices, with no minimum amounts required. However, the service is still currently in the beta stage, and is only available to randomly selected users for the moment.

What should retail traders know ahead of the IPO?

The company filed a preliminary IPO prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday (01 July 2021).

Market observers noted a couple of potential risks with Robinhood’s recent financial results, which were included as part of the filing.

The first has to do with how cryptocurrencies formed a significant proportion of Robinhood’s overall revenue. Roughly 17% of the platform’s sales came from cryptocurrencies in the first quarter of 2021, up from 4% in the previous quarter.

The risk factor here lies in any ‘changes in laws and regulations,’ the company itself noted in the SEC document.

‘Our failure to comply with them, may negatively impact our ability to allow customers to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies with us in the future and may significantly and adversely affect our business,’ it added.

Another risk that was highlighted was the ‘meme stock’ phenomena that took place earlier this year. A number of smaller US stocks, including GameStop and AMC, experienced record gains after retail investors coordinated a concerted effort to send prices soaring.

Robinhood came under fire after it controversially decided to halt trading on the two mentioned companies’ securities, along with a few others, in a bid to ensure it had sufficient funds to cover regulatory requirements and users’ trading activities.

This was a breach of its original mission statement, according to many customers who took to social media after in criticism of the decision.

Last week, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said it fined Robinhood US$70 million for its system outages in March 2020 that ‘caused significant harm’ to ‘millions of customers’.

Risks aside, it should be noted that the brokerage doubled its monthly users from 8.6 million in the first quarter of 2020 to 17.7 million in the first quarter of 2021.

Robinhood says it will trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol ‘HOOD’.

How to trade Robinhood’s upcoming IPO

Get exposure to Robinhood before and after its initial public offering (IPO) at just a fraction of the cost – with IG, the world’s leading Contracts for Difference (CFD) provider. Open a live or demo account with us today.

After the listing

Get exposure to Robinhood shares on the secondary market from its day of listing by:

• Speculating on share price movements using CFDs