These 2 Stocks Led the Market Higher Friday

The stock market finally got the relief rally on Friday that many investors had been looking forward to seeing. Plenty of uncertainty persists, but Wall Street found some confidence that markets wouldn't simply enter freefall. By the close, gains for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI -0.11%), S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.02%), and Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC 0.10%) helped at least to cushion the blow of what was still another bad week for investors.

Data source: Yahoo! Finance.

Thousands of stocks gained ground, but a couple stood out from the crowd. Robinhood Markets (HOOD -1.76%) moved sharply higher as an outside institutional investor known for its ties to the cryptocurrency markets took a stake in the app-based broker. Meanwhile, Duolingo (DUOL -1.88%) had an even bigger gain after announcing its latest financial results.

This crypto innovator sees value in hard-hit Robinhood

Shares of Robinhood Markets were up nearly 25% on Friday. The move came after investors found out about interest from a high-profile innovator in the cryptocurrency field .

Image source: Getty Images.

Emergent Fidelity Technologies filed a disclosure with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission late Thursday, revealing that it had acquired roughly 56.3 million shares of the broker. That  works out to a 7.6% stake in Robinhood. Emergent Fidelity is owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, who is also the CEO of crypto exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried invested about $650 million to purchase the Robinhood shares.

The filing indicates that at least at present, Bankman-Fried doesn't have any intention of taking any activist stance with respect to Robinhood's operations. Instead, the filing merely says that Robinhood appeared to be an attractive investment. Of course, that can change quickly, as investors have seen with similar filings with other companies.

Even after today's gain, Robinhood shares are still down sharply from their IPO price from less than a year ago. It'll take continuing restoration of confidence for Robinhood to mount a full comeback.

Duolingo soars on strong adoption

Duolingo saw even bigger gains, jumping 34%. The language learning app provider reported first-quarter financial results that were good enough to make the company increase its guidance for the entire year.

Duolingo's numbers were strong. Total bookings were up 55% year over year, topping the $100 million mark on a 56% rise in subscription bookings. Revenue rose a similar 47% to $81.2 million, and paid subscriber counts jumped 60% to 2.9 million. Duolingo also had a rise in the number of people using the app regularly on an ad-based freemium model, with monthly active users climbing 23% to 49.2 million and daily active users up 31% to 12.5 million.

Investors were optimistic about Duolingo's profit potential as well. Although the company continued to lose money using standard accounting rules, adjusted pre-tax operating profit rose more than 350% to $3.95 million.

Duolingo sees the good times lasting all year, with 2022 revenue likely to rise to between $349 million and $358 million. Even with expectations for just barely breaking even on adjusted pre-tax operating earnings, Duolingo is getting shareholders excited with increased interaction with its users and the hope to continue pushing subscription growth for the remainder of this year and beyond.