Should You Be Buying What Robinhood Is Selling?

This week’s initial public offering of Robinhood Markets Inc., HOOD 50.41% parent of the wildly popular trading app, isn’t just one of the most talked-about IPOs of 2021. It’s the latest in a long series of pitches to everyday investors: Share in your broker’s wealth by buying shares in your broker.

In rare cases, such pitches have paid off big time. More often, you’d have done yourself a favour by taking roughly half your money and lighting it on fire instead.

Just as Robinhood isn’t the first brokerage to offer commission-free trading, it isn’t the first to seek to “democratize” investing or to sell a piece of itself to its own customers.

On June 23, 1971, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. became the first New York Stock Exchange firm catering to individual investors to offer its shares to the public.

Thirsty for fresh capital in a struggling stock market, Merrill flogged its shares to its own customers, tapping the firm’s “awesome recognition among that vast segment of the population,” reported The Wall Street Journal the next day. “Primarily small investors, the type long championed by Merrill Lynch, quickly purchased the entire amount.”

Nearly 400 insiders at the firm unloaded a total of 2 million shares in the offering. From its initial $28 per share, the stock shot to about $42—a 50% pop—then closed around $39. That valued Merrill at 30.5 times its prior-year earnings, much higher than the overall stock market’s price/earnings ratio of 18.7.

Less than three weeks later, Merrill announced that its net earnings had fallen nearly 50% from the prior quarter.

For the rest of 1971, Merrill’s stock lost 9.4%; the S&P 500 gained 4%, counting dividends.

In 1972, when the S&P 500 rose nearly 19%, Merrill sank 7.7%. And in 1973-74, when the S&P 500 lost 37%, Merrill’s stock slumped by 61%. In its first three full years, Merrill’s stock lost three-quarters of its value; the S&P 500 fell only 5%.

Here in 2021, Robinhood’s offering is one of several trading and investing IPOs: Coinbase Global Inc., the cryptocurrency exchange, went public in April, and Acorns Grow Inc., which helps users invest in tiny increments, said in May that it expects to go public later in the year. Since its Apr. 14 debut, Coinbase is down about 27%. Robinhood fell 8% on its first day of trading Thursday.

One of Wall Street’s oldest and frankest sayings is “When the ducks quack, feed ‘em”—meaning that whenever investors are eager to buy something, brokers will sell it like mad.

Back in 1971, that was the brokers’ own shares. Roughly half a dozen major firms sold stock to the public soon after Merrill, including Bache & Co. and Dean Witter & Co. By 1974, according to data from the Center for Research in Security Prices LLC, several of them had dealt losses at least as devastating as Merrill’s.

In 1987, Jane and Joe Investor got invited to join in on the fun of Charles Schwab Corp.’s IPO, when roughly three million of the offering’s eight million shares were reserved for employees and customers of the firm.

Unlike Merrill, which was rescued from the brink of failure in 2008 when Bank of America Corp. agreed to buy the firm, Schwab went on to generate spectacular long-term performance. Over the full sweep of time since its 1987 IPO, Schwab is up more than 26,500%, or 17.9% annualized. The S&P 500 gained less than 3,500%, or an average of 11.3% annually.

However, Schwab went public in late September 1987. Only 18 trading days later, on Oct. 19, the U.S. stock market took its biggest one-day fall in history, plunging more than 20%.

Schwab’s stock got brutalized. In their first year, Schwab’s shares fell 59.1%. After three years, the market as a whole had gained 0.6% annually; Schwab’s stock lost an annualized average of 6.9%, according to CRSP.

How many of the original buyers in 1987 stuck around long enough to reap the giant rewards that came much later? That’s impossible to know, but the likeliest answer has to be: very few.

Every once in a while, outside investors in a brokerage IPO do well.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. began trading on May 4, 1999. If you’d bought Goldman stock in the IPO and held it ever since, you’d have earned 9.1% a year, versus 7.6% in the S&P 500, according to FactSet.

Yet Goldman was a giant then, as it is now; it was late to the IPO party because it had held on to its partnership structure for so many years. Most brokerage IPOs, like Robinhood’s, occur when the firms are younger and smaller.

That makes them typical. Companies selling shares to the public for the first time tend to be small, with minimal profits; they also require additional invested capital to sustain their rapid growth.

That’s what Savina Rizova, global head of research at Dimensional Fund Advisors, an asset manager in Austin, Texas, calls “a toxic combination of characteristics that points to low expected returns.”

On average, IPOs have severely underperformed seasoned stocks in the long run. And, history suggests, brokerages doing IPOs are better at timing the market for themselves than for you.

As the war against Hamas dragged into 2024, there were worries here that investment would dry up in Israel’s globally important technology sector, as much of the world became angry against the casualties in Gaza and recoiled at the unstable security situation.

In fact, a new survey found investment into Israeli technology startups grew 28% last year to $10.6 billion. The influx buoyed Israel’s economy and helped it maintain a war footing on several battlefronts.

The increase marks a turnaround for Israeli startups, which had experienced a decline in investments in 2023 to $8.3 billion, a drop blamed in part on an effort to overhaul the country’s judicial system and the initial shock of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack.

Tech investment in Israel remains depressed from years past. It is still just a third of the almost $30 billion in private investments raised in 2021, a peak after which Israel followed the U.S. into a funding market downturn.

Any increase in Israeli technology investment defied expectations though. The sector is responsible for 20% of Israel’s gross domestic product and about 10% of employment. It contributed directly to 2.2% of GDP growth in the first three quarters of the year, according to Startup Nation Central—without which Israel would have been on a negative growth trend, it said.

“If you asked me a year before if I expected those numbers, I wouldn’t have,” said Avi Hasson, head of Startup Nation Central, the Tel Aviv-based nonprofit that tracks tech investments and released the investment survey.

Israel’s tech sector is among the world’s largest technology hubs, especially for startups. It has remained one of the most stable parts of the Israeli economy during the 15-month long war, which has taxed the economy and slashed expectations for growth to a mere 0.5% in 2024.

Industry investors and analysts say the war stifled what could have been even stronger growth. The survey didn’t break out how much of 2024’s investment came from foreign sources and local funders.

“We have an extremely innovative and dynamic high tech sector which is still holding on,” said Karnit Flug, a former governor of the Bank of Israel and now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank. “It has recovered somewhat since the start of the war, but not as much as one would hope.”

At the war’s outset, tens of thousands of Israel’s nearly 400,000 tech employees were called into reserve service and companies scrambled to realign operations as rockets from Gaza and Lebanon pounded the country. Even as operations normalized, foreign airlines overwhelmingly cut service to Israel, spooking investors and making it harder for Israelis to reach their customers abroad.

An explosion in negative global sentiment toward Israel introduced a new form of risk in doing business with Israeli companies. Global ratings firms lowered Israel’s credit rating over uncertainty caused by the war.

Israel’s government flooded money into the economy to stabilize it shortly after war broke out in October 2023. That expansionary fiscal policy, economists say, stemmed what was an initial economic contraction in the war’s first quarter and helped Israel regain its footing, but is now resulting in expected tax increases to foot the bill.

The 2024 boost was led by investments into Israeli cybersecurity companies, which captured about 40% of all private capital raised, despite representing only 7% of Israeli tech companies. Many of Israel’s tech workers have served in advanced military-technology units, where they can gain experience building products. Israeli tech products are sometimes tested on the battlefield. These factors have led to its cybersecurity companies being dominant in the global market, industry experts said.

The number of Israeli defense-tech companies active throughout 2024 doubled, although they contributed to a much smaller percentage of the overall growth in investments. This included some startups which pivoted to the area amid a surge in global demand spurred by the war in Ukraine and at home in Israel. Funding raised by Israeli defense-tech companies grew to $165 million in 2024, from $19 million the previous year.

“The fact that things are literally battlefield proven, and both the understanding of the customer as well as the ability to put it into use and to accelerate the progress of those technologies, is something that is unique to Israel,” said Hasson.

Should You Be Buying What Robinhood Is Selling?

The popular trading app isn’t the first to sell a piece of itself to its own customers.

The 28% increase buoyed the country as it battled on several fronts but investment remains down from 2021