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Robinhood's shares jumped. It can thank FTX's CEO.

Sam Bankman-Fried has acquired a 7.6% stake in the online brokerage, and Wall Street likes it.

Robinhood app

Robinhood shares rally on news that FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried acquired a 7.6% stake in the company.

Photo: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Finally, Wall Street’s excited about Robinhood — thanks to Sam Bankman-Fried.

Robinhood shares rallied Friday after the FTX CEO disclosed in an SEC filing that he has acquired a 7.6% stake in the online brokerage. Robinhood’s stock was up about 20% in early trades, pushing the stock back up above $10.

The shares are still off more than 40% year-to-date, amid growing worries about the company’s sluggish growth. Robinhood recently posted a whopping 43% year-on-year drop in revenue, and announced that it was laying off 9% of its workforce.

Bankman-Fried’s move quickly raised eyebrows. CNBC’s Jim Cramer wrote that a Piper Sandler analyst “has no idea what Sam is doing.”

Bankman-Fried, who leads one of the world’s major crypto exchanges, recently became controversial after a Bloomberg interview in which he implied that "yield farming" in crypto was essentially a Ponzi scheme.

Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.

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