8 Comments

Best quote of the week: " It feels like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz’s idea of the democracy they would bring to Iraq and Afghanistan." Priceless!

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There is some evidence to support your prediction that the transactional emails are acting as a marketing device: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4504866

We find that Google search volume spikes around the date that Robinhood sends out its IPO Access notifications. We also observe higher trading volume by Robinhood users in Retail Access IPO stocks versus other IPO stocks, and this trading negatively predicts cumulative post-IPO returns.

(We also find that the average Retail Access IPO stock underperforms compared to other IPOs from around the same time, and even after adjusting for general market trends.)

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I think this analysis misses a couple of important points

1. Many stocks last year which did not go through IPO access (DL) and others also show a sharp drop in price (eg). Roblox, Amplitude. This seems to be driven more by general market trend that any customer behavior driven by RobinHood. It could also be that generally interest is more at IPO and drops off over time (unrelated to Robinhood)

2. I'd be interested to see how stocks have behaved historically post IPO. Facebook did drop over 30% in 1 year after IPO and took a while to recover.

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For companies and similar collective nouns, American English generally uses the singular "it" except when being very casual but British English tends towards "they" (though also using "it" from time to time).

References:

https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1338/199795

https://english.stackexchange.com/a/133106/199795

https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/71088/65839

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2018/01/it-or-they.html

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What's the "Scott Galloway school of stock picking"? I can't even infer that from context.

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So wild.

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It would be interesting to benchmark vs. overall market during the period (since we've obviously been in an overall rough patch). AND do a comparison of companies who did not market their IPOs via Robinhood to see whether not marketing to retail was helpful...otherwise, it's a bit incomplete.

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Jan 22, 2022·edited Jan 22, 2022

Loved the article, overall. As usual. Two comments on minor things:

1. The graphics were fine. No need to apologize. They conveyed the relevant information succinctly and unambiguously. Full stop.

2. Please review a basic grammar rule: It's always "its" when it's a case of possession; i.e., no apostrophe. For example: "its IPO price" or "its blockbuster IPO."

It's only "it's" when you are using a contraction, in place of phrases like "it is" or "it has."

My father once told me that he remembered this by realizing that there is no apostrophe in other possessive pronouns, such as his, hers, ours, yours, theirs.

I know, I know. Grammar nerds are ruining it for everybody. But I have to tell you, little things like that take me right out of the focus on your ideas. I suspect I'm not alone in this, and I suspect that's not what you want.

Other than that, thanks, as always, for a great read.

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