Sam Bankman Fried is the CEO of cryptocurrency arbitration and trading exchange called FTX. Recently, Fried acquired Robinhood shares public. The document of the official stock purchase postulates an investment of $648 million on behalf of Fried into the Robinhood shares. Soon after the news become public, Robinhood shares rallied in the stock market.

As per the latest news, Fried now owns around 7.6 percent of Robinhood shares. He commented on the purchase and claimed that it was an attractive investment option.

He has declared in the acquisition papers that he garners no plans to influence the inner workings of the online trading platform or participate in any type of decision-making process for now. He has also claimed that his investment is purely a portfolio diversification move.

Fried’s Robinhood Purchase

Fried and Robinhood started the process of stock sales and purchases in March this year and the sale was closed recently. He acquired stocks at an average cost of $11.52 for a total of $648 million.

The SEC filing postulates the billionaire now possesses around 27.5 million Robinhood shares. It is worth noting that Robinhood is a relatively new stock option that decided to go for a public listing last year in July.

Amid the ongoing recession predictions and inflation pressure, the price of Robinhood shares felt the burn as well. According to market analysts, the stocks of Robinhood suffered a 70% loss during the last few weeks in addition to a visible decrease in the number of online traders.

The timing of the stock acquisition by Fried who is known as a former Jane Street Trader is interesting taking into consideration the cascading trends of the cryptocurrency market.

Robinhood is visibly leaning more and more towards developing its cryptocurrency sector due to the shrinking responses from its equity markets. Throughout the months, Robinhood has added features like crypto custodial wallets and listing high speculated currencies like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu.

Robinhood also has plans to expand into international markets with the acquisition of a UK-based cryptocurrency enterprise named Ziglu.

Despite investing in Robinhood, Fried has continued to criticize the policies of the brokerage at length. He also battered the decision of Robinhood to delist a specified set of equity options during the meme-stock frenzy season.

To this end, the House Financial Services Committee also summoned the management of Robinhood. Fried later tweeted that the brokerage does not have evil designs behind this delisting but failed to plan their scalability projections.