Amid all the news of the last few days, you might have missed that eToro, an Israeli consumer stock-trading service, is going public in the United States via a SPAC.

Don’t worry about the SPAC bit: If you want a rundown of the deal itself, Mary Ann has you covered. What matters for our purposes is that eToro competes with Robinhood in the United States, though it retains a strong European user base. And, thanks to the fact that it is SPACing itself onto the public markets, we now have lots of its financial data to play with.

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You can see where we’re going with this. With Robinhood somewhere between a sheaf of lawsuits and an IPO, the eToro data could provide an interesting insight into the world in which its zero-cost trading competitor operates. If we want to better understand Robinhood, perhaps eToro can provide some clarity.

We’re going into the eToro investor deck, first asking ourselves what we think of its numbers and financial health and valuation. Then we’ll compare what we learned against what we know about Robinhood’s own business. Let’s go!

eToro is going public

The eToro-SPAC deal is a big one, weighing in at over $10 billion in calculated value. Whether the markets will support the valuation isn’t clear, but the debut matters for the Israeli startup market and the (Read more...)