Daily Crunch: Robinhood restricts GameStop trading

The GameStop stock saga continues, Apple releases more details about its privacy changes and Qualtrics goes public. This is your Daily Crunch for January 28, 2021.

The big story: Robinhood restricts GameStop trading

Robinhood has responded to an upsurge in retail investors buying shares in companies like GameStop, AMC and Blockbuster by restricting trading on “certain securities” to “position closing only,” meaning that users can no longer buy more of the companies’ stocks. (It says it will allow “limited buys” tomorrow.)

This comes after the current buying spree — targeting stocks shorted by institutional investors and spurred by the WallStreetBets forum on Reddit — took Robinhood and Reddit to the top of the app charts.

Now, Robinhood is being hit with numerous 1-star reviews, and the move also attracted criticism from politicians on both sides of the aisle, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez describing it as “unacceptable” and Senator Ted Cruz tweeting, “Fully agree.”

The tech giants

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature will be enabled by default and arrive in ‘early spring’ on iOS — The plan is to launch these changes in early spring, with a version of the feature coming in the next iOS 14 beta release.

Qualtrics prices IPO at $30 per share, above its upgraded target range — The company sold 50.4 million shares in the process.

Twitter is already working on integrating newsletters on its site, following its Revue acquisition — It appears “Newsletters” will soon be the newest addition to Twitter’s sidebar navigation.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Workday acquires employee feedback platform Peakon for $700M — Peakon says companies have used its platform’s weekly surveys to ask more than 153 million questions since inception six years ago.

Fintech darling Nubank raises blockbuster $400M Series G at $25B valuation — The fintech company now has 34 million customers.

Flowhaven raises $16M to evolve brand licensing management beyond emails and spreadsheets — The media licensing business is a massive market, but much of the work involved is still handled manually through emails and spreadsheets.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Thirteen investors say lifelong learning is taking edtech mainstream — As learners become more multi-layered and nuanced, so have the edtech companies that back them.

Talent and capital are shifting cybersecurity investors’ focus away from Silicon Valley — Solving the cybersecurity problem will take more time and resources than we are currently allocating.

Mind the gap: E-commerce marketers should revise their TAM and SAM estimates — 2021 is going to be another glorious year for e-commerce.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Smartphone sales slowed decline in Q4, with a big assist from Apple — The past year was, of course, a major blow to an industry already suffering a slide.

GM pledges to be carbon neutral by 2040 with zero tailpipe emission vehicles by 2035 — It’s a big step for a company whose products are responsible for a large percentage of global greenhouse gas emissions.

UCLA is building a digital archive of mass incarceration with a new $3.6M grant — The “Archiving the Age of Mass incarceration” effort is being led by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, director of the university’s Bunche Center for African American Studies.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

by Anthony Ha