stock

Robinhood’s Long Nightmare Ahead

Business

Michael D’Angelo, Staff

cnbc

Robinhood can be accessed by retail investors anywhere from their mobile phone. Robinhood boasts giving investors autonomy over their finances with low barriers to entry and nonexistent brokerage fees.

The old English tale of Robinhood has been passed down for generations and describes a story of populism where a legion of men equipped with bow and arrow take from the rich and give to the poor. Fast forward to the 21st century and Robinhood is known as a discount brokerage firm used by many new investors and retail traders. You may have heard in the past few weeks that Robinhood was at the center of the GameStop saga or you caught their Superbowl ad during the game, chances are you have heard of the investing app. The news certainly is filled with Robinhood headlines lately. 

            Introduced in March 2015, the platform gained popularity with their approach of having no commission fee investing. The story of Robinhood began with Stanford roommates Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev. Both worked on Wall Street for a period of time, designing software, until the two decided they needed a change. They founded Robinhood with the purpose of eliminating barriers for the little guy and democratizing investing. Since Robinhood’s inception, the app now boasts well over 10 million users, but the company has been struggling with a public relations nightmare since the start of the year. 

            When the pandemic began in March, many people with strong gambling tendencies turned to both the stock market and the internet. They chose Robinhood as their choice of brokerage and they flocked to a reddit forum known as Reddit Wall Street Bets (WSB). Headlines popped up from the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and, most notably,  the Collegian about some of these traders and their impact on the financial markets. Robinhood was picking up some negative publicity at the time with complaints of slow software, minimal customer service support and hidden fees. They were even threatened with a lawsuit surrounding high frequency trading data and hedge funds. In addition, a Robinhood user committed suicide after an in-app glitch showed he was in the red for over $700k. Currently, Robinhood is faced with a pending lawsuit from the individual’s family. 

            But things went from bad to worse at the start of 2021. Users from Reddit WSB saw that hedge funds were heavily shorting GameStop (GME). Retail investors flocked to reddit and called for many to buy shares into GME. As many bought shares and GME’s stock price flew over $300 a share, Robinhood entered a cash crisis. They ran out of cash to clear trades with the Depository Trust Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and Robinhood changed orders of GME to sell only, after only a few days the stock price declined heavily. In that short period of trading, they were forced to raise $3.4 billion. 

            The world erupted and many were livid. They took to social media websites like Instagram, Reddit and Tik Tok preaching that Robinhood violated their rights to trade. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received more than 100 Robinhood related complaints between Jan. 24th to Feb 2nd and in response to the criticism, Robinhood issued a statement. They described a DTCC clearing issue and then aired a commercial during the Super Bowl promoting their slogan, “We are all investors.” The commercial did very little to help the company and many continued to complain over social media. 

            With a public relations nightmare on their hands, the company might be forced to postpone their plans to go public in the second quarter, but, as of now, Robinhood is in full swing to go public this year. They are currently valued at $20 billion or more. With the public’s frustration, Robinhood’s future is in question. If Robinhood is to continue on, they must update their customer service, apologize to the angry masses, and make right to achieve change in the financial sector.

dangelom2@lasalle.edu 

Cathie Wood and ARK Innovation: the Newest Tech Bulls

Business

Michael D’Angelo, Staff

charlierose

Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of ARK Invest, Cathie Wood (pictured above), is known on the street as a star stock-picker.

Chances are if you are a retail or an institutional investor you probably hold long positions in exchange traded funds (ETFs) or equities relating to the technology industry. Many investors want to chase the next hot technology company that is going to change the world while, preferably, garnering high returns. Some retail investors do not have the time, knowledge, energy and/or skill to pick their own individual stocks. Instead of picking stocks by themselves, investors turn to institutional fund managers to pick heavy stocks for them. Investors will purchase ETFs and mutual funds which track tech companies’ performance.

Many institutional fund managers create ETFs dedicated to following tech companies. A major ETF which tracks the tech heavy NASDAQ composite, QQQ is managed by Invesco. Vanguard manages VGT which focuses on information technology and State Street manages multiple funds dedicated to tracking various tech stocks’ market performance. 

The newest fund manager from the street to popularize tech fund management is Cathie Wood at Ark Investment Management, LLC. Wood is the real deal with managing portfolios. She holds the title of CEO and CIO of Ark Investment Management LLC. In the past, Wood worked as an assistant economist with the Capital Group in the late 70s, then as a managing director for Jennison Associates LLC and then as a limited partner for Tupelo Capital Services. Later she worked as a Chief Investment Officer at Alliance Bernstein. Wood joined ARK investment Management in 2014 and, as mentioned above, she holds the title of CEO and CIO. Wood certainly has plenty of experience in the industry and her fund returns are impressive. 

Wood managed the largest actively managed ETF in 2020 which is the Ark Innovation ETF. The ticker symbol of the ETF is ARKK. ARKK’s objective is to seek an increase in long-term capital growth by investing at least 65% of the company’s assets in American and foreign tech equities that will change the world around us. Ark calls world-changing equities, a “disruptive innovation.” 

Wood has been crushing the game since 2016 with the Ark Innovation ETF. A quick look at the prospectus for ARKK reveals the ETF returned at market value 66.47% for the year ended on July 31st, 2020. In 2019, the total market return was 12.27%, 52.38% in 2018, 43.72% in 2017, 4.9% in 2016 and from October 31st, 2014 to August 31st, 2015, the return was 0.50%.  As of December 31st, 2020, ARKK’s top 10 holdings were Tesla (10.8%), Roku (6.9%), CRISPR Therapeutics (5.5%), Square (5.3%), Teladoc Health (4.4%), Invitae Corp (4.1%), Zillow (3.1%), Pure Storage (2.8%), Proto Labs (2.8%) and Spotify (2.7%). ARKK closed January 26th at $141.38.

Ark maintains other actively managed ETFs like Ark Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW), ARK Fintech Innovation ETF (ARKF), ARK Genomic Revolution ETF (ARKG), ARK Autonomous Technology and Robotics ETF (ARKQ), the 3D Printing ETF (PRNT) and ARK Israel Innovative Tech ETF (IZRL). All of these ETFs are dedicated to finding innovative companies with the objective of changing their respective industry and the world. 

Wood still has time to prove her stock picking skills and to return more money to her shareholders. Wood has expressed interest in creating a bitcoin ETF after bitcoin hits a $2 trillion market capitalization, and she has further expressed intent on creating an ETF dedicated to following space companies. The future is looking bright for both ARK and Wood. Time will only be able to tell the success of these companies and the bullish tech attitude of their founder.

dangelom2@lasalle.edu