Tesla, Amazon, Coinbase: most popular stocks

This year’s ranking of the most popular stocks on the markets has a curious and interesting twist: alongside the usual Tesla, Apple and Amazon, Coinbase also appears in the top 10. 

The research was conducted by financial trading platform CMC Markets and reported in their Q1 trading report. 

By far the most popular stock was Tesla, followed by Apple and Amazon. But there are differences between the generations. 

Tesla, Apple, Amazon and Coinbase: the best stocks among the veterans

Note that there are already significant differences between the so-called “Silent Generation” and the Baby Boomers. 

The Silent Generation is made up of 80- and 90-year-olds, and although they also prefer Tesla in second place, they put Lloyds Banking and NVIDIA in third. Apple, however, is still in fourth place, while Amazon does not even make the top ten.

Curiously, Netflix and Rolls-Royce are also included. 

This is also the segment of investors who, on average, are the most successful at trading, probably due to the considerable experience they have accumulated over the years. To be clear, this is Warren Buffett‘s generation. 

Their winning strategy seems to be holding. 

The baby boomers, on the other hand, are in their sixties and seventies, and after Tesla they put Apple and Amazon. Curiously, they put China’s Alibaba in third place, followed by NVIDIA and Meta (formerly Facebook). 

Also in their top ten are Lloyds Banking, Microsoft, Alphabet (formerly Google) and Barclays. There are, however, many similarities between the strategies of these two veteran generations.

Young adults (Gen X)

However, habits change when you look at the behaviour of the younger generations. 

Generation X, those in their 40s and 50s, are not so different from the baby boomers, but they put Coinbase in ninth place. 

This is very curious, both because Coinbase’s stock performed very poorly in 2022, and because it is a stock with a very small market cap compared to the others. 

For example, they put Alphabet in eighth place with a market capitalization of almost $1,370 billion, while Coinbase’s market capitalization is around $14 billion. 

However, they ranked Credit Suisse in tenth place, with a capitalization of just under $14 billion before the crash in April. 

Gen Xers are the oldest generation to have Coinbase in their top 10 most popular stocks, and the only one to have Credit Suisse.

Millennials, or those in their thirties and twenties, also have Coinbase in ninth place, but with Amazon slipping to fifth and NIO in tenth. 

NIO is less capitalised than Coinbase and is a well-known Chinese electric car manufacturer: it’s a bit like China’s Tesla. They are the only generation to have NIO in the top 10, and they are also the generation whose shares are at the lowest level.

The very young and the choice of stocks between Tesla, Apple, Amazon and Coinbase

Curiously, there are no big differences in the top 10 of the so-called Generation Z, i.e. teenagers and post-teens. 

In fact, the top three are still Tesla, Apple and Amazon, with Meta in fourth, NVIDIA in fifth and Microsoft in sixth. 

However, GameStop, a near-bankrupt ‘meme stock’ that has rebounded thanks to its community’s stock market push, stands out in seventh place. 

Gen X puts Coinbase in eighth place, while Alphabet slips to tenth. But perhaps most curiously, they are the only ones, along with the 90-year-olds, to have Netflix in the top 10.

Coinbase on the stock exchange

The only really big surprise in these rankings is Coinbase, as the three dominators are taken for granted, as is the presence of Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet. 

Alibaba only interests baby boomers and NIO only millennials. It also comes as no surprise that genZ are interested in GameStop. 

Of course, the 90s top 10 are the most original and different from the others, which is perhaps why they get the best results.

Coinbase is in almost all of the veterans’ top 10, and this, coupled with the fact that its performance has been abysmal for a long time, makes it even more interesting to see how the older generations are making more money from trading than the younger ones.  

Presumably, because they prefer to hold, they are actually losing less rather than making more, since most traders lose money in the long run. 

In other words, a more conservative strategy seems to perform better on average when analysing the collective performance of traders, including casual amateurs. 

In this light, the dominance of Tesla even among veterans is very surprising. In this case, perhaps it is the automotive sector that can still attract so much attention.