When Robinhood announced its first earnings as a public company on Aug. 18, the Redditors on the WallStreetBets forum barely raised a murmur.
When Robinhood announced its first earnings as a public company on Aug. 18, the Redditors on the WallStreetBets forum barely raised a murmur.
Which was surprising, because Robinhood is the beloved trading platform of choice for WallStreetBets users. It’s the app they’ve used since last year to buy meme stocks they collectively adored: GameStop $GME, or AMC, or BlackBerry. And after Robinhood listed on the Nasdaq $NDAQ on July 29, a surge of Redditors decided to lean into the meta—to turn Robinhood, the meme stock trading app, into a meme stock itself.
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In the first week of August, Robinhood’s stock soared. One day, it rose more than 80% and prompted several halts on trading. In the course of a two-day streak, the market capitalization of Robinhood went from $18 billion to $57 billion—a boost that made up for a somewhat tame IPO.
But that fever has subsided. At the peak, around Aug. 4, WallStreetBets featured nearly 3,000 daily mentions of Robinhood’s ticker symbol HOOD, according to Swaggy Stocks, which tracks the Reddit $RDDT channel. Five days later, the mentions had dwindled to fewer than 100. On the day of Robinhood’s earnings, the mentions climbed briefly to around 250 before subsiding to near-zero levels.
It isn’t that WallStreetBets thinks Robinhood is a bad buy. One Swaggy Stocks chart, which tracks the sentiment of WallStreetBets posts, shows that although more Redditors regard Robinhood stock negatively rather than positively, the difference in numbers isn’t vast. Rather, it’s just that they don’t care about the stock much any more. Even as Robinhood’s executives were talking through the details of the company’s earnings, all the chatter on WallStreetbets was about State Street $STT Global Advisors. Robinhood had become, once again, just a way to buy and sell State Street and other meme stocks of the day.
