When a stock more than doubles its initial public offering price in less than a week, a price drop is almost inevitable. It is inevitable when the company registers to sell another 97 million shares in a secondary offering of shares currently owned by big investors. That’s what Robinhood Markets Inc. (NASDAQ: HOOD) did Thursday morning. That’s not the whole story though.
The company sold about 25% of its IPO stock to some 300,000 retail investors. When shares fell by around 8% on the first day of trading, some of those investors sold their shares. More probably sold their stock, regardless of Robinhood’s active discouragement of selling if the investor bought the shares with the company’s app. If a Robinhood investor sold shares within 30 days of the IPO, the company would bar them from trading in other IPOs for 60 days.
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That restriction probably contributed to the first-day price drop and the slow march upward over the next two trading days. Shares jumped on Tuesday and leaped even more on Wednesday. Bloomberg opinion writer Matt Levine commented:
If retail investors can buy at the IPO price, they won’t have to buy in the market the next day, so a hedge fund that buys at the IPO price won’t be able to flip to desperate retail investors at a profit the next day. So from the beginning, you get a stock with a lot of retail interest and not a lot of institutional interest. And it turns out that retail interest is as volatile as everyone expected.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. (NYSE: AMC) bounced back a bit in the noon hour Thursday. It seems that Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit against Disney for violating her contract by releasing “Black Widow” simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ may give AMC and other theater owners hope. If Johansson wins, Disney and other studios may be forced to scale back or even end simultaneous releases. That would be good news for AMC.
Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (NASDAQ: CLNE) has been a favorite of meme stock investors since nearly doubling the stock’s price between February 2 and February 7. Since then, volatility has provided profits for diamond hands investors. The company reports quarterly results after markets close Thursday.
GameStop Corp. (NYSE: GME), like AMC, was getting a reprieve from a two-month trend of sinking share prices. Trading volume in the stock also continues to decline, and without a little volatility, the stock could have serious trouble recovering.
Robinhood traded down almost 15% on Thursday, at $60.10 in a post-IPO range of $33.25 to $85.00. The stock has traded about 86 million shares a day. More than 44 million had changed hands already on Thursday.
Clean Energy Fuels stock traded up about 4.5% to $7.18 in the noon hour, in a 52-week trading range of $2.36 to $19.79. The average daily trading volume on the stock is 16.2 million shares, and nearly 4 million had traded.
AMC was up more than 5% to $31.35 in the noon hour Thursday. The 52-week range is $1.91 to $72.62. The average daily trading volume is 174.5 million shares, and about 673 million had traded.
GameStop traded up about 4.7%, at $153.67 in a 52-week range of $4.06 to $483.00. The average daily trading volume is around 6 million shares, and about 1.5 million had traded through Thursday’s lunch break.
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