Robinhood is back in the news, though not in a way that will please the company or long-suffering shareholders. The stock trading app features prominently in the new movie Dumb Money, based on a Ben Mezrich book, that chronicles the meme stock insanity of 2021 when amateur investors drove up the price of moribund companies like GameStop and RadioShack—and then posted about their "tendies" (a.k.a. chicken tenders, a.k.a. market profits) on Reddit. Sebastian Stan of Captain America fame plays Robinhood cofounder and CEO Vlad Tenev.
It's not a great thing when your brand is associated with pop culture excess, but Robinhood is lying in the bed it made. When I profiled the company in 2020, Tenev laid out a series of plans he said would transform it into a Charles Schwab for a new generation of investors—but then Robinhood jettisoned most of these plans to milk the meme stock mania. Likewise, Robinhood's crypto strategy was informed by a windfall quarter from Dogecoin, a token that (surprise, surprise) proved to be a flash in the pan.
