The pandemic effect is slowing, Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by what the weekday Exchange column digs into, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? check in here.
Our work in the week began in China, dug into African startup activity, addressed China once more , took a really deep dive into the Latin American startup ecosystem and wrapped with a re-evaluation at the Robinhood IPO. In other words, not much was really happening at all!
You may are surprised to ascertain Amazon’s stock fall off a cliff Friday. After all, the corporate posted huge revenue gains to only over $113 billion during the quarter. And AWS, its public cloud business, appeared to tick along nicely.
But investors had expected more growth and had priced the Seattle-based e-commerce player accordingly. When Amazon missed revenue expectations and projected Q3 2021 growth of “between 10% and 16% compared with third quarter 2020,” investors abandoning of its stock.
But as some within the financial press are noting, it’s not just Amazon that’s taking stick from investors. Etsy and eBay also fell in the week . It appears that investors are anticipating that a period of turbocharged growth in e-commerce because of the COVID-19 pandemic is slowing a minimum of , and should actually be over. meaning valuations are getting to get reset at a number of companies, startups included.
Not that each company slowing down after the pandemic’s early phases is suffering, Duolingo managed a robust opening week as a public company despite slowing growth. But delta variant or not, the investing classes are changing their market framing. We’d be smart to stay that in mind.
It’s the products, stupid
Something that’s stuck in my teeth in the week is what proportion Robinhood has changed the sport regarding consumer investing. Sure, in the week was mostly about the company’s IPO and its somewhat relaxed early trading performance. But, buried in its final S-1/A filings is new evidence of Robinhood’s cultural impact.
At the highest of the U.S. consumer investing unicorn’s filings may be a pair of statistics. they appear like this:
Image Credits: Robinhood
Dang, you’re thinking, that’s tons of funded accounts and monthly active users. on the other hand again, those are March 31, 2021, numbers. they’re out of date. within the same filing, Robinhood indicated that its June 30 quarter saw its funded accounts tally grow to 22.5 million. That’s 25% growth during a single quarter!
Naturally, there have been a couple of things happening within the second quarter of this year that won’t happen again, but it’s still a bonkers result.
Early Robinhood investor Jan Hammer of Index sent over a comment within the wake of his investment’s public offering, arguing that the corporate is a component of labor being done by tech companies to shake up financial services. Companies like Robinhood, he wrote, are “not just a fresh coat of paint for an equivalent old financial products.”
I think that’s correct. and therefore the point is pretty damning of incumbent players still within the market with dated websites and medium-grade mobile experiences. are you able to imagine getting a Gen Zer to swap out Robinhood or eToro or M1 Finance for, I don’t know, John Hancock? The toothpaste, as they assert , isn’t going back to the tube.
How might Fidelity and Vanguard convince Robinhood users to maneuver to their services? Will they be ready to , or has a whole generation of investors skipped the normal finance players entirely? Robinhood bulls must think so, and that i can’t really find it in me to fight the attitude .
I don’t skills Robinhood will perform within the coming quarters, but it does feel — given the MAU numbers from Robinhood, AUM figures from M1 then forth — that fintech startups stole several marches on your trusty 401(k) provider. A market that i’m sure the fintechs will soon dig more deeply into.