Robinhood, the app that lets you trade stocks without paying fees, has been a runaway hit with millennials, who have driven the startup to a reported $1.3 billion valuation.
The thinking behind Robinhood was that younger people would want to trade stocks differently: namely on their phones and without the fees. But are the stocks they trade different as well?
To answer that question, we asked Dr. Sahill Poddar, a data scientist at Robinhood, to crunch the numbers. By and large, the top stocks millennials held by dollar amount were similar, but they were almost twice as likely to hold computer chip designers AMD and Nvidia as older people were. Conversely, those over 30 were almost twice as likely to hold Yahoo.
In terms of the top 10 stocks, Twitter and gold (via JNUG) made the over-30 list, but didn’t appear on the under-30 one, whereas Google (GOOGL) saw the reverse.
“Overall, millennials trade more often than non-millennials (2.75 times more), but the average dollar amount per trade is half,” according to Poddar.
It's worth noting that Robinhood is a new platform, so you might expect the stocks to skew toward things like technology. But still, the differences between the under- and over-30 crowd are instructive in understanding what different generations think of the stocks.
With that in mind, here are the top 10 stocks millennials love on Robinhood (by dollar amount):
No. 10: Google (GOOGL)
No. 9: Netflix (NFLX)
No. 8: SPDR S&P 500 trust ETF (SPY)
This ETF is designed to track the S&P 500.
No. 7: Snap (SNAP)
No. 6: Nvidia (NVDA)
No. 5: Tesla (TSLA)
No. 4: Facebook (FB)
No. 3: Apple (AAPL)
No. 2: Amazon (AMZN)
No. 1: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Top stocks held by non-millennials on Robinhood (by dollar amount)
Apple (AAPL)Amazon (AMZN)Tesla (TSLA)Facebook (FB)Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)Nvidia (NVDA)Snap (SNAP)Netflix (NFLX)Twitter (TWTR)Direxion Daily Junior Gold Miners Bull (JNUG)