A woman walks by a GameStop store in Brooklyn, New York City, the US. Photo: AFP

The retail trading mania continues to roil the Wall Street, although it seems to be less crazier over recent days as retail traders find it increasingly difficult to effortlessly win. 

Whether their one-track buying mentality works or not, online brokerages, especially some of Chinese origin, have shown to be winning with their app downloads soaring amid the retail frenzy.

Menlo Park-based free-trading pioneer Robinhood, one of the largest online brokerages in the US, has arguably been at the center of the GameStop saga. The heavily shorted brick-and-mortar video game vendor turns out to be a battlefield for average traders to pile up long positions against notable short selling institutions including Melvin Capital and Citron Research.

The unprecedented trading warfare that has squeezed short selling professionals, prompted Robinhood and other trading apps to announce trading curbs on January 28, instantly infuriating retail investors who were prevented from continuing to buy.  The restrictions proved to be a damper on runaway upswings in shares of GameStop and a few other highly shorted stocks.

Although Robinhood has moved to scale back restrictions on a list of stocks including GameStop in recent days, its trade restriction announcement, seen by many traders as betraying its core customer base, comes across as having fueled a shift toward other retails.

Webull Financial, a commission-free trading app created by Wang Anquan, who had previously worked for Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Xiaomi, has shot to prominence in the US market amid the retail trading mania.

It moved to lift trade restrictions faster than Robinhood, which earned traders' favor. The Chinese app booked a 16-fold surge in new trading accounts in a single day last week, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

Webull couldn't be immediately reached for comment.

Webull, one of the fastest-growing retail trading apps in the US, was the second most popular among free apps on Apple's iPhone last week, according to Bloomberg. 

The app's downloads topped 800,000 in January, CNBC reported on Monday. This compares with Robinhood's downloads of over 3 million in January, its highest on record.

While Webull has taken advantage of Robinhood's restrictions to become a bigger rival to the US trading app, Futu and Up Fintech are among the Chinese apps enabling users, mostly from China, to access trading in Hong Kong and US securities that also briefly lifted trading curbs, resulting in quick returns in terms of downloads.

Global Times