HOOD Climbs 8.92% as Robinhood Gets the Nod to Underwrite IPOs

From Distributor to Underwriter

The driver is a genuine business-model expansion. On June 9, CEO Vlad Tenev said Robinhood Securities had won approval to serve as an IPO underwriter, moving the firm past its existing IPO Access platform, where it historically joined deals as a selling-group member distributing whatever shares the lead banks chose to hand over. Underwriter status lets Robinhood help structure deals, set or market the price range, and negotiate how shares split between retail and institutions — the economics-bearing seat at the table, not the back of the distribution chain.

Tenev framed it as a shift in the entire retail-allocation conversation: "The question changed from 'why allocate to retail at all?' to 'how big can the allocation be?'" He was explicit that Robinhood intends to be disruptive in a space long fenced off by a handful of Wall Street banks. The market read it as a real second leg to the brokerage story, not a press-release flourish.

Record Metrics and a $110 Target

The approval didn't land in a vacuum. The same day, Robinhood reported May operating data showing $377 billion in total platform assets, up 9% month over month and 48% year over year, alongside 27.7 million funded customers and $5.6 billion of net deposits. Equity notional trading volumes hit $315 billion, up 75% year over year — the engagement and asset-gathering trends that underwrite the rest of the bull case are still accelerating, not rolling over.

Cantor Fitzgerald leaned in, raising its price target to $110 from $100 and keeping an Overweight rating. Notably, the call rests less on the underwriting headline than on Robinhood's Rothera prediction-markets joint venture with Susquehanna, which Cantor expects to recapture most of the exchange economics that third-party Kalshi currently collects. The target works out to roughly 27x the firm's 2027 adjusted EBITDA estimate blended with a DCF — a valuation that assumes prediction markets become a Robinhood-owned revenue line rather than a pass-through to Kalshi.

Erasing the S&P Snub

For continuity, this fully reverses HOOD's last big move. On June 5 the stock dropped 9.57% to $79.86 when S&P Dow Jones Indices left it out of the June rebalance, unwinding the index-inclusion premium traders had front-run. At $88.05, HOOD has not only recovered that selloff but printed back above the pre-snub high.

The distinction matters. The pre-snub run leaned on a calendar event — forced passive buying that never showed. This bid is built on a structural expansion of what Robinhood does plus fresh record operating data. The S&P candidacy is still intact for whenever a seat opens, so the index trade hasn't vanished; it's just no longer the thing holding the stock up.