Robinhood Opens US IPOs to UK Retail Investors With No Commission

Robinhood opened US initial public offerings (IPOs) to its UK customers today (Monday) and will charge no commission. Customers can request shares at the official offer price before trading starts, the company said.

London debuts do not appear in the announcement, which covers new US listings. British investors used the same regulatory route in June, when they bought about $364 million of stock in SpaceX’s Nasdaq IPO, City AM reported.

London’s trading industry is coming home!

IPO Access joins crypto trading, added through Bitstamp in August, in Robinhood’s UK app. The company said it works with a UK public offer platform provider, without naming it.

Requests Go Through General Investment Accounts

Customers will submit requests from a general investment account and can read the prospectus and US filings on each asset’s page in the app, Robinhood said. That account type is separate from the stocks and shares individual savings account Robinhood UK launched in February.

The US version dates to 2021, and Robinhood said it has since worked on more than 50 IPOs and reached millions of US customers. Coinbase began taking IPO requests from eligible US retail customers in September, with limits on those who sell within 30 days.

The US product “levelled the playing field for retail investors,” Jordan Sinclair, president of Robinhood UK, said in the announcement.

Robinhood’s disclosure says IPO share prices can be highly volatile, particularly soon after listing. SpaceX fell about 32% from its June 16 peak within two weeks, although at around $153 it remained above the $135 offer price.

Eight UK Platforms Lined Up for SpaceX

Robinhood said UK access to IPOs has historically been reserved for high-net-worth individuals and large institutions. SpaceX’s IPO and Anthropic’s planned listing show how many British brokers now distribute such shares to retail clients through public offer platforms.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) opened that regime in January. It lets companies sell shares to a broad investor base, retail included, without a regulated market listing or a full prospectus.

The route has critics. Mike Coombes of PrimaryBid argued in City AM that the regime was meant for private UK companies and warned that overseas issuers could reach British investors more easily than London-listed ones. An FCA spokesperson said the regulator wants to encourage retail investing.

Marex Financial ran SpaceX’s UK retail offer, with eight platforms able to submit orders, among them AJ Bell, CMC Markets and eToro. Marex said more than 100,000 UK investors wanted to take part.

Interactive Brokers, another of the eight, opened its allocation to UK residents at the $135 offer price on June 4.

Anthropic has named six UK platforms for a planned retail offer coordinated by RetailBook, its help center shows. Robinhood is not among them.

At least four platforms appear in both the SpaceX and Anthropic groups, by FinanceMagnates.com’s count. Two of them, eToro and Interactive Brokers, are among the firms whose website traffic by country FM Intelligence’s heat map tracks, and the others are AJ Bell and Interactive Investor.

This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.