Love it or hate it, Robinhood is now worth more than $11 billion.
The controversial trading app announced on Monday that it raised a new $200 million round of funding that now values the startup at $11.2 billion.
Robinhood’s newest windfall, its second major round this year, comes months after the app and its more than 10 million users help spark the so-called “Robinhood Rally” that saw retail investors push the market upwards by betting on cheap stocks that institutional traders on Wall Street had no interest in touching.
Robinhood makes most of its profits by having larger financial firms like Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial execute its actual trades, selling them user data as part of a practice called “selling order flow.”
Profiting on order flow is a contentious issue on Wall Street, and many traders have accused Robinhood of letting under-informed day traders artificially spook the market by letting larger firms use the data to exacerbate often bizarre trends.
The company came under fire in June when a 20-year-old user committed suicide after he believed he had racked up enormous debt trading options on the app. That tragedy might have been averted, the young man’s family claimed, if Robinhood had provided better education on options trading, or at least had professionals available to users.
“To ensure we continue to meet our customers’ needs… we’re hiring hundreds of new registered financial services representatives this year in Southlake, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona,” Robinhood said in a Monday statement.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/17/controversial-trading-app-robinhood-now-worth-11-2b/
