After making unwanted headlines with its disappointing initial public offer (IPO) debut on Nasdaq last week, shares in stock and cryptocurrency trading app Robinhood take seen wild volatility in recent days. In an ironic twist that saw the price of HOOD stocks soar by as much as 82% in one day, the app that has so frequently been the beneficiary of frenzied meme stock trading itself began to resemble the latest online craze.

Since its debut on Nasdaq on July 29, HOOD is upwardly 102% and is trading at $seventy.39 at the time of writing, down only slightly from its peak on Wednesday at $85. In response to such wild volatility and an exponential surge in retail trading volume, Nasdaq dealt the company a dose of its own medicine by halting trading multiple times.

Antony Pompliano'due south quip refers to Robinhood's notoriety amidst retail and crypto investors for its decision to suspend trading in GameStop (GME) and other stocks amidst unprecedented retail-driven price volatility earlier this year. It drew farther ire for temporarily disabling instant deposits for crypto purchases every bit Dogecoin (DOGE) surged by 900%. This unpopularity elicited a degree of enjoy from online traders at the app'south first floundering debut for its public offer.

Analysts accept proposed that a midweek decision past Ark Invest'south Cathie Wood to increase her position in Robinhood — adding 89,622 shares of HOOD in Ark Fintech Innovation exchange-traded fund to the three.fifteen million Wood had already bought upward — may have been the spark for the subsequent price turnaround. HOOD's rapid, meme stock-like price surges accept since largely been fueled past the buzz among retail traders online.

Co-ordinate to Swaggy Stocks, which tracks the elevation trending stocks mentioned on the pop subreddit r/Wallstreetbets, HOOD was by far the most mentioned stock on the forum over the past 24 hours, with 2,770 mentions against 265 for Tesla (TSLA), 1,960 for the SPDR S&P 500 trust (SPY) and 488 for Moderna (MRNA).

Related: Robinhood introduces a feature aimed at protecting investors from crypto volatility

Retail investor sentiment tracker Breakout Indicate has also confirmed that its aggregate retail popularity framework, which "aggregates beyond dozens of retail chatter/sentiment sources," has HOOD as the nearly pop ticker of recent days. Breakout Indicate founder Ivan Ćosović has attributed HOOD'south metamorphosis from "a very hated IPO in the retail world" to meme-like stock to three factors: the influence of Forest's bullish position, some retail "investors on the sidelines [who] decided to give information technology a endeavour," and the subsequent, familiar online FOMO.

As previously reported, a series of major organization outages on Robinhood this spring preventing users from accessing their accounts have also galvanized traders to rally backside multiple grade-activeness lawsuits confronting the visitor in the U.s.a..

The company has paid $57 million in fines to the U.S. Fiscal Industry Regulatory Authority, as well every bit providing roughly $12.6 one thousand thousand in restitution to certain customers, later the regulator alleged that the trading platform acquired "widespread and pregnant harm" to thousands of users and had "systemic supervisory failures" since as early as September 2022. The platform has also been nether scrutiny from federal and state-level U.S. securities regulators and congress members over its handling of the Gametop matter.