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Vlad Tenev, one of the founders of Robinhood – an American platform for quick access to the stock markets, is now officially the richest Bulgarian. After last night’s debut of the company on the NASDAQ stock exchange, his personal wealth was estimated by Bloomberg at $ 2.4 billion.
His ally Baijut Bhatt has $ 2.8 billion, which could have been much higher if the stock market had not gone lower than expected.
Tenev is the CEO of the platform, founded in 2013, which works today with cryptocurrencies and is accessible to ordinary people who have decided to take a risk on the stock exchange even with only 1 dollar. According to Bloomberg, it is used by almost 18 million consumers every month, and half of them are investing for the first time, most of them aged 18-40.
The start of the so-called “People’s IPO” was on July 29, and during the session the capital assessment of the company was 31.8 billion dollars.
Tenev and Bhat chose to offer the lower limit of the preliminary valuation of the shares in order to avoid their depreciation on the first day. But the desired effect did not work out – one of the most anticipated for the year so far the company’s listings on the stock exchange began with a collapse of 12% in the share price and ended below the starting level.
For the same purpose, Robinhood had retained – contrary to Wall Street tradition – control over almost 25% of the shares offered, but this did not spare the disappointment, especially since the forecasts were for an increase of 11% at the opening of the session at $ 42. action.
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The company even intended to control over 35% of the shares it offered to private (rather than corporate) clients when it went public, but in the stock markets it is believed that keeping more than 10% is more of a signal for volatile valuation during trading. The latest typical example is Facebook, which had kept 25% of its IPO and its shares depreciated by 11% on the first day, and it took more than a year to return to valuation when it went public.
Vlad Tenev tried to persuade the “sofa investors” not to part with their shares immediately, in which case they would be banned from trading in Robinhood shares for the first 30 days after the stock exchange went public.
However, the company took an additional risk by allowing its employees and directors to sell 15% of their shares on the first day and another 15% in 3 months. The usual is the so-called insiders to be in the prohibition period for trading IPO shares in the first 3-6 months.
Probably the role of the still insurmountable insult of many small investors since January, when under the pressure of the regulators Robinhood forbade them to play on the stock exchange with shares like those of GameStop, along which platforms like Reddit organize sharp manipulations. On the other hand, for the same reason, Tenev and Bhat are not favorites of hedge funds, which lost billions of dollars in this unusual situation at the beginning of the year.
