Robinhood Investors Have Been Fleeing: These Charts Show Why

(Bloomberg) — Robinhood Markets Inc.’s free fall has stopped, at least for now.

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After losing more than two-third of its value since the company’s initial public offering, the stock erased early declines Friday, a day after reporting fourth-results that missed Wall Street estimates. The shares rose 52 cents to $12.13 at 12:54 p.m. in New York.

Robinhood’s market capitalization is now about $10.5 billion, compared with $29 billion when the stock debuted in July. The shares had plunged 69% since the IPO through Thursday:

Investors’ immediate reaction to Robinhood’s latest quarterly report was to flee. The brokerage reported a net loss and revenue that both missed Wall Street estimates. And it may get even more challenging: The firm forecast first-quarter net revenue of less than $340 million, which would be a decline of more than a third from the same period last year.

In a call after the results, executives laid out plans for new business lines, including tax-advantaged retirement accounts and fully paid lending, as well as international growth. But with those ventures yet to materialize, the headwinds facing the stock remain. Some analysts are lowering their price targets in the wake of the lackluster results.

Here are some of the takeaways from the report:

Stock-trading revenues haven’t come close to the first-quarter of 2021, when the meme-stock frenzy buoyed Robinhood. Perhaps more worrying, even in a quarter where Bitcoin reached its loftiest price ever, revenue from cryptocurrency transactions slipped slightly from the previous three-month period, drawing in $48 million.

Even though Wall Street has been predicting losses for the firm, Robinhood’s adjusted performance has been worse than consensus for each of the three quarters that it has reported as a public company.

In response to criticisms — particularly about its customer service — Robinhood has been staffing up across the firm. Those moves have dramatically increased its operating expenses, which in the fourth quarter were 162% higher than in the year-ago period. And Robinhood said Thursday that operating expenses could increase as much as 20% in 2022.

(Updates with share price in second paragraph.)