Robinhood Crash Steals Their Momentum
On Monday, March 2nd the popular Brokerage App “Robinhood” crashed and was down almost all day due to a code mistake related to Leap Day. This coincided with a surge in the stock market resulting from the FED dropping rates after a run of market issues (you can read my previous post about Twitter’s reaction to the market drop here). This was a major problem for options traders on the world’s first major free brokerage app as they were unable to unload their market calls or puts while the market trudged on without them.
I took to Social Studio to take a look at what happened on social media during the Great Robinhood Crash of 2020…well the first Great Robinhood Crash since the app went down again today in the midst of one of the largest stock drops in history.
The first thing that stands out is that traffic on the 2nd was MASSIVE. There were over 27,000 Twitter posts compared to only about 1,800 on the Monday before. The mainstream news, blogs, and aggregators also picked up the story blasting the company. Sentiment also saw a major shift with March 2nd seeing almost 56% negative sentiment compared to Monday’s 30% negative sentiment. The word clouds look similar with most people still trying to get a free stock (you and a friend get free stocks when you refer them to Robinhood), but common words included #RobinhoodDown, crashed, and responsible.
Today, the app took another social media and news beating when the app crashed at the market open. Chatter matches the previous Monday with almost 55% negative sentiment and at this point over 9,000 posts as of 5:00 pm. It will be interesting to see what the long term ramifications are for the app, but right now trust has to be low as the app has failed its users in two of the most important moments in recent market history.