Re <<corporations are people in the most exceptional country ever! -g->>
How true, that corporations are legal people in all domains, but you forgot that in any system where it be one-dollar-one-vote, corporations might be more than people, especially when corporations in effect dictates to the central banking authority, arguably.
Certainly some corporations are more than people in other ways.
Take Robinhood, it appears to be a corporation that benefits from its own clients stir frying its shares ... a/k/a perpetual motion machine
bloomberg.com
Robinhood Catches Its Own Meme Stock Spotlight With Wild 100% Surge
Ingredients that make for breakneck, frenzied trading are coming together for the brokerage firm, almost a week after it flopped in its public trading debut.
Annie Massa
5 August 2021, 05:42 GMT+8
Enthusiasm from small-time investors, a surging stock price that’s baffling analysts, options trading, Cathie Wood’s endorsement and Jim Cramer’s tweets.
Ingredients that make for breakneck, meme stock-style trading are coming together for Robinhood Markets Inc., almost a week after it flopped in its public trading debut. Speculation is now swirling around what’s behind a surge that’s boosted its shares by 100% this week. Robinhood’s stock, which fell about 8% from its $38 IPO price during its Thursday debut, closed at $70.39 Wednesday.
The sudden rebound echoes the volatile rally in Reddit darlings such as GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. that have captivated Wall Street this year. Market participants point to a confluence of factors behind Robinhood’s wild move: Wednesday marked the first day of options trading on the stock — which can drive swings — and Ark Investment Management’s Cathie Wood — who boasts a large retail-investor following — is continuing to add shares to her funds.
About 329,000 options contracts on Robinhood changed hands Wednesday. That makes the opening day volume for its options the second highest ever, behind Facebook Inc., according to a note from Henry Schwartz, head of product intelligence at Cboe Global Markets Inc., an options exchange operator.
“My feeling is that this move is not as sophisticated, it’s more of a herd mentality move like AMC or GameStop,” said Chris Grisanti, chief equity strategist at MAI Capital Management. “Looking at the chart and scratching our heads and saying I don’t know is the same feeling we had with GameStop and AMC.”
In an unusual move, the company had sought to allocate as much as 35% of the shares in its initial public offering to individual investors, but eventually sold about 20-25% to them. Demand was weak compared with other recent high-profile listings like Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global Inc. and Coinbase Global Inc.
On Tuesday, however, total retail volume surged about 10-fold from the previous day, data from Vanda Securities show. In the first three hours of Wednesday’s session, more than 100 million shares changed hands, over five-times what was seen in recent days.
The Robinhood options contracts that saw the greatest volume Wednesday were calls, or contracts that allow an investor to buy shares, with a strike price of $70 that expire Aug. 20, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Robinhood is “trading on emotion,” said Hugh Tallents, senior partner at consultancy CG42. “There are major believers and major naysayers, and they all are at war with each other, and the options market enables that to a scale even greater than just buying and selling the asset itself.”
Michael Jason Gill, 39, a disabled U.S. military veteran living in Oak Hill, West Virginia, said he bought 13 shares of Robinhood on its first day of trading, and added 6 more on Monday. Gill, who’s had a Robinhood account for three months, said that CNBC’s Jim Cramer influenced his decision. The TV personality tweeted a series of positive messages about Robinhood shares.
“I’m starting to realize that if this is big enough for certain players in the game to speak on it, those guys have been there a long time and I put some trust in them,” Gill said. “It’s in the news, it’s in the know.”
Nora Chan, a spokeswoman for Robinhood, declined to comment beyond previous statements made by company executives about remaining focused on the long-term. Ark Investment also declined to comment on its purchases.
Robinhood didn’t list its own stock on its list of Daily Movers on its app, which displays shares with the biggest price swings. The stock that posted the largest price increase on that list, BeyondSpring Inc., rose 176% Wednesday. Robinhood jumped 50%, paring an earlier increase of as much as 82%.
AMC and GameStop, meanwhile, lost 11% and 4%, respectively.
(Updates with closing share price and options trading data in the second and fourth paragraphs.)
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