Want Robinhood Shares? If You're A Customer, You Could Get Them First

One highly anticipated 2021 initial public offering could offer shares of the company to its customers before hitting the public markets.

What Happened: Robinhood is considering selling a minority of its IPO shares to its customers in a direct sale, according to Bloomberg. No decision on the number of shares to be offered has been made.

Related Link: Robinhood Aims For Potential IPO In 2021: Report

Why It’s Important: Robinhood is expected to IPO in the first quarter of this year. The company was valued at $11.7 billion in September.

The company has seen an influx of new traders over the last year. Robinhood has 13 million accounts. By offering shares to its customers first, it could quickly gain some new account sign-ups and lower the possibility of people leaving the platform.

Retail investors typically don’t get access to buy IPOs at the offering price. This could be part of the reason why shares of DoorDash Inc DASH and Airbnb Inc ABNB saw strong first-day pops. 

Robinhood users will want to pay attention to their emails. Airbnb hosts missed out on the early shares offered at $68 by not opening the emails with the subject “Airbnb’s directed share program.”

One host who did open the email bought 200 shares and sold all of them at $144, netting $15,000.