📅 On This Day
Robinhood Debuts on Nasdaq at $38, Then Stumbles
Five years ago today, Robinhood Markets opened on the Nasdaq at $38 per share, carrying a valuation of roughly $32 billion — and promptly fell about 8% before the closing bell. For a high-profile tech IPO, a down first day was a jarring omen. The company had become a household name during the GameStop frenzy just months earlier, but controversy over trading restrictions and its payment-for-order-flow model cast a long shadow over the offering.
Robinhood had never paid a dividend and had not yet turned an annual profit when it went public.
HOOD — Robinhood Markets Inc
🇺🇸 US
Source: The Wall Street Journal; CNBC
📅 On This Day
Robinhood Debuts on Nasdaq at $38, Then Stumbles
Five years ago today, Robinhood Markets opened on the Nasdaq at $38 per share, carrying a valuation of roughly $32 billion — and promptly fell about 8% before the closing bell. For a high-profile tech IPO, a down first day was a jarring omen. The company had become a household name during the GameStop frenzy just months earlier, but controversy over trading restrictions and its payment-for-order-flow model cast a long shadow over the offering.
Robinhood had never paid a dividend and had not yet turned an annual profit when it went public.
HOOD — Robinhood CDR (CAD Hedged)
🇺🇸 US
Source: The Wall Street Journal; CNBC
🌍 Around the World
Switzerland's 35% Dividend Tax Dares Investors to Fight Back
Switzerland levies a 35% withholding tax on dividends — among the steepest in the world. Even when a tax treaty trims the effective rate to 15%, foreign investors must pay the full 35% upfront and then navigate a complex, multi-year reclaim process with the Swiss Federal Tax Administration to recover the difference. The paperwork is so forbidding that many retail investors simply absorb the loss, effectively watching a 3% gross yield shrink to 1.95% net.
Several global ETF providers now use synthetic replication for Swiss equity exposure just to sidestep this withholding maze.
🇨🇭 CH
Source: Swiss Federal Tax Administration; Bogleheads international tax guide
🔥 Dividend Streak
Canadian Utilities Holds a 52-Year Streak Behind a Modest Label
Canadian Utilities has raised its CAD-denominated dividend for 52 consecutive years as of 2024 — a feat that matches the elite US "Dividend King" threshold. Yet on the S&P/TSX Canadian Dividend Aristocrats index, it carries the same "Aristocrat" label as a company with just five years of increases, because that is all the methodology requires. For cross-border investors, the lesson is clear: always read the index rulebook before trusting a title.
CU.TO has been growing its dividend since 1972 — decades before most Canadian Aristocrats were even founded.
CU
🇨🇦 CA
Source: Canadian Utilities Investor Relations; S&P Dow Jones Indices Canadian Aristocrats methodology
💡 Did You Know
FDR Once Tried to Force Companies to Pay Dividends
In 1936, President Roosevelt pushed through the Undistributed Profits Tax — a levy on corporate retained earnings designed to compel companies to pay out profits as dividends and jolt the Depression-era economy. FDR proposed rates as high as 73.9%, though Congress settled on a graduated scale topping out at 27%. Corporate America rebelled with accounting maneuvers, and the tax was watered down by 1938 and fully repealed by 1939 — but not before permanently reshaping how American companies think about returning capital.
Historians trace the modern embrace of share buybacks partly to corporate memory of that era's "mandatory dividend" politics.
Source: US Treasury historical tax records; Tax Foundation historical analysis