Robinhood day traders swarmed to Eastman Kodak Co. shares as the stock rallied 1,600 per cent this week.
As of 11 a.m. in New York on Wednesday, 43,000 users of the investing app had added Kodak to their accounts in some form over the past 24 hours, according to website Robintrack.net, which aggregates data from the brokerage but isn’t affiliated with it.
The activity was 20 times more than the next most-popular stock, Actinium Pharmaceuticals Inc. Roughly 27,000 of the additions came over a four-hour span earlier Wednesday.
The growing presence of retail investors has become a popular markets narrative this year with zero commission fees and the potential for entertainment in a world largely without sports or gambling luring a new crop of traders.
The impact they have on prices is unclear, but similar buying sprees have erupted in pockets of the equity market, including electric-vehicle firms, shares of companies in bankruptcy protection and increasingly pharmaceutical stocks. Earlier this month, Tesla Inc. attracted Robinhood traders at a pace of 10,000 an hour.
Kodak -- famous for its pioneering work in film photography -- surged 331 per cent to US$34.24 as of 11:34 a.m in New York. The rally began after it won a government loan to assist in the production of a coronavirus treatment.
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