Online brokerage Robinhood set to open at offer price in Nasdaq debut

REUTERS -Shares of online brokerage Robinhood Markets Inc were set to start trading at their offer price on the Nasdaq, in an underwhelming reception to one of the most hotly anticipated listings of the year.

At 11.28 a.m. ET on Thursday, the shares were indicated to open at US$38 each. At that price, the brokerage would be valued at about US$31.75 billion.

The company, arguably the breakout financial technology startup of its generation, priced its IPO on Wednesday at the lower end of its US$38 to US$42 range and raised US$2.1 billion.

Robinhood's long-awaited debut comes months after it found itself at the center of a confrontation between a new generation of retail investors and Wall Street hedge funds.

Earlier this year, its decision to restrict trading in a few popular stocks following a tenfold rise in deposit requirements at its clearinghouse had enraged the U.S. lawmakers as well as users of its app, a go-to destination for retail investors.

It has also been at the center of several regulatory probes.

Robinhood had planned to reserve 20per cent and 35per cent of its offering for users of its trading app, according to its regulatory filing.

The company was founded in 2013 by Stanford University roommates Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt. The two will hold a majority of the voting power, with Bhatt keeping around 39per cent of the outstanding stock and Tenev about 26.2per cent.

Robinhood has about US$12 billion in cryptocurrency assets as of March 31, a 23 times rise in its holding from a year earlier, it had said earlier this month.

Tenev, who is also the chief executive, told CNBC that it was clear that app's users were interested in cryptocurrency.

More than 9.5 million customers traded about US$88 billion worth of cryptocurrency on Robinhood's platform in the quarter ended March 31.

Retail interest around cryptocurrencies has pushed up prices of popular digital currencies like Bitcoin this year.

(Reporting by Niket Nishant and Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru and Echo Wang in North Carolina; Editing by Arun Koyyur)