NEW YORK, July 29 (Reuters Breakingviews) - What do investors in Robinhood Markets’ initial public offering get for their $32 billion? An attractive app, some regulatory probes and a stock that could end up as the plaything of retail investors, for starters. But the digital brokerage’s market debut also offers up something else: a huge, young and hard-to-copy customer base. For those with a strong stomach, that makes Robinhood more like an option than a meme-stock. At the $38-per-share price that the company announced on Wednesday, the bottom of its indicated range, Robinhood’s 21.3 million monthly active users are being served up at just under $1,500 each. By the same measure, a customer at rival Interactive Brokers (IBKR.O) fetches over 10 times that. The ‘hoodies have less to spend: just $4,500 in their accounts on average compared with roughly $250,000 at Interactive Brokers and Charles Schwab (SCHW.N). The bull case for Robinhood is that founder Vlad Tenev can narrow that gap. It’s not so far-fetched. For one, net worth tends to rise with age: The median American aged 35 to 44 has around $91,000, according to Federal Reserve data, but an individual in the next age-bracket up has almost twice that. And at least for now, Robinhood’s users are relatively young at 31-years-old on average versus 47 for U.S. users of Interactive Brokers. The bigger picture is that financial firms are engaged in a land grab. Big banks like Goldman Sachs (GS.N) and JPMorgan (JPM.N) – both underwriters of Robinhood’s IPO – are among those working hard to scoop up young customers. And yet Robinhood is a clear winner. JPMorgan added 2.4 million digital bank users last year while Robinhood added 11.1 million active users. Warm bodies bring option value for firms that can cross-sell multiple products and services, and one day, Robinhood’s IPO advisors could even become suitors. Of course, there’s another possibility: That rivals will pick off Robinhood’s best customers. People who decamped Robinhood for other brokerages took nearly $20,000 on average with them in the first quarter – four times the mean account balance. If Tenev lets down his guard, Robinhood could end up as just a feeder for other financial firms, or worse if some of the legal and regulatory risks come to a boil. If not, investors in the IPO might find that they have bought the kind of strategic option that Wall Street firms pine for. Follow @johnsfoley on Twitter CONTEXT NEWS - Robinhood Markets, the trading platform that took a central role in the retail stock-trading frenzy of early 2021, priced its initial public offering at $38 per share on July 28. - At its IPO price the company has a market value of $32 billion. Robinhood will raise around $1.9 billion in new money, after deducting fees. - Underwriters Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan had set a price range of $38 to $42 a share. - The company’s shares are due to begin trading on the Nasdaq exchange on July 29.