(Bloomberg) -- The darling of U.S. stock trading mania isn’t so popular anymore.
Robinhood Markets Inc.’s metrics of active users and app downloads plunged during the third quarter, according to analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. While the company has previously flagged that activity would weaken, the drop seems far worse than expected, the analysts said.
The combination of less trading activity and revenue, plus more Robinhood shares coming to market, means that the stock price is bound to take a severe hit, wrote JPMorgan’s Kenneth Worthington and Samantha Trent in a note on Wednesday. They predict that Robinhood shares could plunge about 20% by the end of the year.
“We do not see growth as sustainable and we question the ability of the company to generate competitive margins,” they wrote.
Robinhood shares slid 1% of as 9:57 a.m. in New York. A spokesperson for the company wasn’t immediately available for comment.
Robinhood’s app downloads, a proxy for account openings, fell 78% in the third quarter compared with the second, said JPMorgan analysts, citing tracking data from Apptopia. That compares with a drop of around 50% for Binance, Coinbase and other crypto apps that also rode the retail trading trend.
Daily active users plunged 40% during the period, compared with 23% for crypto peers and 30% for Schwab, they said.
“Robinhood is particularly dependent on transactions for revenue, the decline in DAUs may have a more pronounced negative impact,” the analysts wrote, referring to daily active users.
To be sure, Robinhood shares have already been battered this year by concerns over a slowdown in trading. The stock sank in August after the company warned about third-quarter results. It’s still up about 13% since going public in July.
JPMorgan is more bearish on Robinhood than others on Wall Street. The bank has the only sell recommendation among analysts tracked by Bloomberg.
By Thyagaraju Adinarayan
