Robinhood Stock Debuts at $38, Immediately Drops 9% Before Recovering

The online brokerage app Robinhood debuted its stock on the Nasdaq Thursday, only to see a 9% drop in share prices over the first 15 minutes.

HOOD debuted at $38, which gave Robinhood a $32 billion valuation. After the initial drop, shares recovered and were sitting at around $36 after an hour of trading.

Today's debut is the culmination of a long, arduous journey for Robinhood, which has become the trading app of choice for young investors over the past few years. It's also gained traction among crypto traders as an alternative to Coinbase, and played a key role in the rise of Dogecoin earlier this year (Coinbase didn't list Dogecoin until June).

The company has also faced scrutiny over frequent service blackouts and a controversial business model known as payment for order flow, which critics say gives retail traders a raw deal.

Late last month, FINRA fined Robinhood $70 million over a series of outages and communications mishaps that resulted in "widespread and significant harm suffered by customers."

UPDATE, July 29, 4:05pm: Robinhood stock closed its first day of trading at $34.85, an 8.4% drop from its debut price.