Yahoo Finance Millennials are frantically searching for Pokémon on the stock market
Pokémon GO, the augmented-reality mobile game that went instantly viral upon its release, has been a great boon to the stock price of Nintendo, which owns a piece of The Pokémon Company and the game’s developer, Niantic Labs. Nintendo (NTDOY) is up 87% since the game launched in the U.S., and it may be young people driving the interest.
Searches for “Nintendo” are surging on Robinhood, a mobile stock-trading app aimed at millennials, according to the company.
The irony: Robinhood only lists U.S. equities. Nintendo trades on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The young, perhaps not-so-stock-market-savvy investors searching for stocks on Robinhood can’t buy Nintendo on the app or even view its chart, but that’s not stopping them from also searching for “Pokemon” and “Niantic” as well. In total, Robinhood says it has seen 210,000 searches for those three terms on its app since July 6. Robinhood says it is an unusually high number of searches on the app for a single company. (You could buy Nintendo shares over-the-counter through Scottrade at $7 commission.)
Robinhood, which launched in March of last year and recently hit 1 million users, says it has handled more than $6 billion in transactions. It charges zero commission fees. The average age of its users is 28, and Robinhood says 25% of users have no previous investment experience.
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Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
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