Shares of Robinhood Markets Inc. experienced a decline in after-hours trading on Tuesday as the popular trading app reported lower-than-expected revenue. Despite benefiting from higher interest rates, the company faced challenges with a drop in active users and reduced trading activity.
New Ventures in the UK and EU
In an effort to expand its reach, Robinhood announced plans to launch a brokerage service in the United Kingdom and enable crypto trading in the European Union within the next few weeks.
Q3 Financial Performance
Robinhood reported a net loss of $85 million, or 9 cents per share, for the third quarter. This is an improvement from the loss of $175 million, or 20 cents per share, during the same period last year. Sales for the quarter increased to $467 million from $361 million in the previous year’s quarter.
Market Expectations
Although the company’s performance showed improvement, analysts polled by FactSet had expected a loss of 10 cents per share on revenue of $480 million.
Revenue Breakdown
While Robinhood experienced a sharp increase of 96% in net interest revenues, reaching $251 million, revenue from equities-trading dropped by 13% to $27 million. Additionally, revenue from crypto trades declined by 55% to $23 million. However, options revenue remained unchanged at $124 million.
User Activity
Monthly active users decreased by 16%, totaling 10.3 million during the quarter.
Stock Performance
Shares of Robinhood slid 7% in after-hours trading on Tuesday. However, the stock has witnessed a year-to-date growth of approximately 20%, following a broader market recovery.
Robinhood’s Expansion Efforts Facing Challenges
Robinhood, the popular investment platform, has been continuously expanding its services to cater to retail traders. They have ventured into crypto trading, Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), and all-day trading. Additionally, Robinhood has expressed its ambitions for international expansion. However, despite the recent market rebound, the platform has observed a decline in monthly active users over the past year. This can be attributed to the diminishing effects of pandemic stimulus payments and the fading hype surrounding meme-stocks in 2021.
Furthermore, Robinhood is facing additional concerns regarding the resumption of student-loan payments after a pandemic-induced pause. The impact of higher interest rates on borrowing, investing, and spending is also a factor that can potentially affect Robinhood’s operations.
According to Chief Executive Vlad Tenev, nearly half of the assets under Robinhood’s custody belong to account holders over the age of 40. This indicates that older customers tend to entrust significant assets on the platform.
To combat these challenges, Robinhood has focused on catering to active and sophisticated traders. Their offerings include Robinhood Gold, a service that provides extra data and offers a 4.9% interest rate on uninvested brokerage cash. Additionally, the platform has made efforts to attract customers through retirement services, which have proven beneficial as interest rates rise.
In a disclosure made in September, Robinhood revealed that it had spent over $600 million to repurchase shares that were seized by the government from Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of crypto exchange FTX. FTX faced a significant downfall last year, leading to Bankman-Fried’s recent conviction on multiple counts related to fraud, resulting in billions of dollars in losses for customers. The shares were originally acquired by Bankman-Fried through Emergent Fidelity Technologies.
Overall, Robinhood’s expansion efforts are currently being met with challenges, but the platform remains determined to adapt and overcome these obstacles to provide a seamless investment experience for its users.