Back in 2021, I launched a simple public experiment: the Robinhood 100 Index. The thesis was straightforward. By investing a baseline amount ($1.00) across the 100 most popular stocks on the platform, I wanted to build an unadulterated tracker of retail investor sentiment. It was designed to watch what happens when the collective hive-mind of internet investors dictates a portfolio.
Opening up that tracking sheet years later is like walking through a corporate graveyard. Amidst the massive winners and steady compounding giants, five distinct tickers flash a brutal, eye-catching -100.00% performance, their current values resting at a flat $0.00.
But here’s the ultimate plot twist: in the stock market, a dead ticker doesn't always equal a dead company. Looking closer at this "dead list" reveals a fascinating truth. While some companies absolutely collapsed under the weight of their own hype, others simply evolved, rebranded, or were bought out for staggering piles of cash. Let’s perform a post-mortem on the five stocks that seemingly went to zero.
The True Casualties: Total Value Destruction
1. Nikola Corporation (Ticker: NKLA)
If you want the textbook definition of a retail-driven tragedy, look no further than Nikola. Born out of the hyper-hyped 2020–2021 SPAC bubble, Nikola briefly boasted a market capitalization that rivaled legendary legacy automakers, despite having never sold a single commercial vehicle.
The collapse was spectacular. Founder Trevor Milton was eventually convicted of federal securities fraud—most notoriously for faking an engineering demonstration by literally rolling an unpowered truck prototype down a hill to make it look functional in a promotional video. The company repeatedly burned through billions of dollars trying to scale its hydrogen-electric semi-truck technology, only to be hit with devastating product recalls. Nikola officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and by late 2025, its equity shares were declared completely null, void, and worthless. It is a genuine, pure-loss zero.
2. Hexo Corp (Ticker: HEXO)
Hexo represents the painful bursting of the Canadian cannabis "Green Rush." During the peak of the legalization hype, retail investors poured millions into cannabis producers, believing the market would expand infinitely. Instead, the industry choked on massive oversupply, hyper-fragmentation, crushing government over-regulation, and a highly resilient black market.
Hexo attempted to survive by aggressively acquiring competitors using debt-fueled deals, right as valuations cratered across the board. Saddled with toxic debt they couldn’t service, Hexo faced a structural collapse. In mid-2023, Tilray Brands (TLRY) swept in to buy the remaining scraps of the company for a modest $56 million in stock. For early investors, the microscopic share conversion ratio meant their original equity was functionally wiped out, sending the HEXO ticker straight to the graveyard.
The "Ghost" Losses: Ticker Changes & Evolution
3. Square Inc. (Ticker: SQ)
Seeing Square on a list of complete failures might make you double-check your eyesight. Rest assured, the fintech powerhouse behind millions of merchant registers is completely fine.
The $0.00 valuation on the spreadsheet is entirely a data illusion. In late 2021, CEO Jack Dorsey famously rebranded the company to Block, Inc. to mirror its expansive focus on Cash App, Tidal, and blockchain ecosystems. Then, in an unexpected corporate move, Block officially changed its primary trading ticker on the New York Stock Exchange from SQ to XYZ. Because the original "SQ" identifier was permanently retired, automated spreadsheet algorithms and data-scrapers pull a flat zero, mistaking a corporate evolution for a business bankruptcy.
4. New Residential Investment Corp. (Ticker: NRZ)
Much like Square, New Residential Investment is a phantom loss. This massive mortgage real estate investment trust (REIT) never went out of business; in fact, it continues to operate as a major dividend-paying heavyweight.
The total loss on the dashboard is the result of corporate streamlining. In August 2022, the company terminated its external management agreements to internalize operations and slash overhead costs. To celebrate this new era of independence, they rebranded as Rithm Capital Corp. and shifted their ticker symbol to RITM. While original shareholders simply saw their stock convert cleanly to the new ticker, old unmaintained tracking sheets tracking NRZ were left looking at a ghost town.
The Ultimate Winner's Circle: Cash Buyouts
5. Activision Blizzard (Ticker: ATVI)
Activision Blizzard is the best kind of zero you can possibly have in a portfolio. Investors didn't lose a single penny here; instead, they were handed a beautiful bag of cash.
In January 2022, Microsoft dropped a bomb on the tech world by announcing its intention to acquire the gaming giant behind Call of Duty and World of Warcraft for a staggering $69 billion. Despite facing an absolute gauntlet of global antitrust scrutiny, the mega-merger officially crossed the finish line in October 2023. Shareholders were paid out an all-cash premium of $95.00 per share, and the ATVI ticker was delisted from the NASDAQ. The ticker displays as zero today simply because it is no longer a publicly traded entity.
Macro Lessons: Reading Between the Spreadsheet Lines
💡 Hype Is Not a Business Model: The total destruction of Nikola stands as a permanent warning against investing in pre-revenue companies fueled purely by PowerPoint presentations and charismatic founders. Cash flow will always outlast charisma.
💡 The First-Mover Trap: Being an early pioneer in a newly legal market (like Hexo in cannabis) is incredibly dangerous. Capital discipline and managing dilution matter significantly more than reckless empire-building.
💡 Keep Your Portfolio Data Clean: Unmaintained spreadsheets lie. Corporate actions like mergers, rebrands, and ticker migrations mean you must actively audit your data, or you'll mistake a profitable buyout for a financial catastrophe.
A Side Note on the Mechanics: The Fractional Share Landscape
Looking back at this experiment, the ability to build an entire index using tiny, single-dollar slices of stock was a massive paradigm shift. There's been a bit of chatter in retail circles lately suggesting that platforms like Robinhood have completely abandoned fractional share trading, but that's a common misconception.
Robinhood still fully supports fractional shares for mainstream, major-exchange listed giants (like buying $1.00 of Apple or Microsoft). Where they did aggressively clamp down was on fractional trading for Over-The-Counter (OTC) stocks and micro-cap equities that undergo heavy delistings or reverse splits—which is precisely the kind of messy corporate behavior seen on our "dead list."
If you are looking to build highly automated, custom indices using fractional shares across a broader universe of assets without these limitations, you aren't stuck with one platform. Brokers like Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and Interactive Brokers have built out robust fractional systems that make slice-based diversification incredibly easy and highly customizable for the modern everyday investor.
Conclusion
Tracking the Robinhood 100 Index has proven that the stock market is a living, breathing, shifting ecosystem. Out of five apparent corporate deaths, we found one fraud-fueled collapse, one capital-starved fire sale, two corporate rebrands, and one multi-billion-dollar cash win. Investigating your biggest portfolio losers is rarely fun, but peeling back the layers under the hood provides the most valuable financial education money can buy.
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
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