As stocks for GameStop and AMC Entertainment continue their confounding surge, the popular mobile day-trading company Robinhood is looking for a home in the nation’s financial capital.
The Menlo Park-based company, a favorite among retail traders who have recently been squeezing short sellers, is looking to lease about 60,000 square feet for a Manhattan office, sources familiar with the search told The Real Deal.
It would be the first Big Apple headquarters for Robinhood, which currently has offices in the Bay Area; Lake Mary, Florida; Denver and London. The company recently posted a handful of jobs to its website for several engineer positions in New York City.
A spokesperson for Robinhood could not be immediately reached for comment.
The company has been in the news recently as traders pumped up the prices of beleaguered companies like GameStop, AMC and Blackberry that Wall Street investors had shorted. The wild stock moves at first puzzled investors, who couldn’t point to any material changes in the companies’ performance that would explain the surge in interest.
The surge was revealed to be driven by investors on a Reddit message board, r/WallStreetBets, who rallied to take on Wall Street, though there are concerns that scam artists could be running a pump-and-dump scheme.
On Thursday, Robinhood restricted trading of several companies including GameStop and AMC, citing volatility in their stocks. Users of the app filed a class-action lawsuit in response to the restrictions.
The company was founded in 2013 by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt.
Robinhood expanded to Denver early last year, reportedly leasing more than 35,000 square feet in the city. In a blog post from August, the company wrote that it planned to hire hundreds of new employees in Southlake, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona.