Roblox gains grow after bumper NYSE debut as Ark fund buys in

[March 11, 2021]  (Reuters) - Shares of Roblox Corp jumped on Thursday, building on the gaming platform's almost 55% rise on its stock market debut a day earlier as well-known exchange-traded fund operator Cathie Wood bought into the company.

The California-based company's stock was up 12% in premarket trade, after rising more than 20% earlier in the day.

Wood's ARK Next Generation Internet exchange-traded fund (ETF) said it had bought more than 500,000 shares of Roblox, weighting it at 0.47% of the fund.

Wood, a long-time Tesla bull, has a massive online following and is a popular topic of discussion on the Reddit forums that are seen as having driven this year's growth in influence for a social-media savvy herd of small-time traders.

ARK Invest on Wednesday also sold a little over 67,000 Facebook shares from the ARKW ETF, amounting to about 0.3% of the ETF's assets.

Message volumes on Roblox on trading-focused social media site Stocktwits soared more than nine-fold on Thursday, with more than 80% of users' messages reflecting positive sentiment toward the scrip, data showed.

Usage and spending on Roblox has surged as kids stuck at home in the COVID-19 pandemic spent more time on the platform, fuelling an 85% year-on-year jump in daily active users in 2020 and a surge in monthly in-app sales.

An average 37.1 million people globally log on to Roblox daily to connect with friends and play popular games like "Jailbreak" and "Speed Run 4".

(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain, Aaron Saldanha and Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru; editing by Patrick Graham)

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