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Robinhood shares slide below offering price in debut

The company had already priced shares at $38, the bottom of its IPO range.

Robinhood
Robinhood’s in trouble
Image: Olena Panasovska / Alex Muravev / Protocol

Robinhood shares tumbled in early trading Thursday as the online brokerage made its debut as a public company. Shares of HOOD opened at the offering price of $38, edged up briefly before falling sliding in midday trades. The stock was last down more than 11%.

Stephen Diamond, a law professor at Santa Clara University and a corporate governance expert, noted the delay in Robinhood's opening trade which he said could be "a sign of some chaos in finding a stable equilibrium. It may mean sell orders are outstripping buy orders, putting pressure downward," he told Protocol.

The company had priced its offering at $38 late Wednesday, the low end of its $38-$42 IPO range.

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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