In 2013, Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt founded Robinhood Markets Inc. (ticker: HOOD) with the laudable goal of making investing in the financial markets accessible to everyone, even people with only a few bucks to invest. They called their concept “democratizing” investing, and they’ve been disrupting the traditional financial industry ever since.
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Discount brokerages and commission-free trading platforms had been around for a while, but Robinhood’s launch became almost synonymous with another advance in investing technology: mobile investing apps. With the easy-to-open, low-dollar-minimum accounts on the intuitive Robinhood app and fractional trading, suddenly many millions of first-time investors were able to participate in the markets.
Robinhood quickly succeeded in its core mission of eliminating barriers to investing and making a wide range of investments and financial products affordable and accessible to as many people as possible. In fact, according to the company’s financial filings, Robinhood had 23.5 million open and funded accounts as of January 2024.
While Robinhood is not a social network, the trading platform has incorporated some aspects of social networking, including business news and market information that can be shared between active users. In addition to being a brokerage firm, Robinhood has become a community where investors can share ideas and learn from each other.
With so many users actively investing and many of them talking to each other, it pays to stay informed about stocks Robinhood users are buying. Keeping an eye on Robinhood’s most popular stocks can be a valuable source of investing intelligence. In other words, Robinhood can be a helpful barometer of stock market sentiment.
With that in mind, here are the eight most popular stocks on Robinhood right now:
1. Tesla Inc. (TSLA)
2. Apple Inc. (AAPL)
3. Nvidia Corp. (NVDA)
4. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)
5. Ford Motor Co. (F)
6. Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)
7. GameStop Corp. (GME)
8. AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. (AMC)
Tesla Inc. (TSLA)
TSLA is a unique combination of automaker and energy company. The company designs, manufactures and sells the world’s most popular line of electric vehicles
to car buyers around the world, and it offers solar-powered electric energy generation and storage systems to residential and commercial customers in the U.S., China and internationally.
TSLA is run by its visionary and colorful CEO, Elon Musk. Incredibly tight margins make it difficult for the company to maintain consistent profitability, but it is able to generate an impressive and growing revenue stream.
On July 23, TSLA reported $25.5 billion in sales for the second quarter, which allowed it to book $1.48 billion in net income. Wall Street is looking for $90 billion in revenue for the full year of 2024, and is expecting that sales figure to grow about 16% to $105 billion in 2025.
Apple Inc. (AAPL)
Apple is a $3.2 trillion mega-cap company that is preeminent in the mobile device and consumer electronics segment of the technology sector.
AAPL is a leader in the design, production and distribution of smartphones, tablets, business and personal computers, wearable devices, and many other products that connect to the internet and allow access to cloud computing.
Hardware, however, is not all this innovative company offers. It provides a wide variety of related products and services such as music and video games. The company’s App Store is one of the most popular retailers of digital content in the world.
Apple will take in an estimated $357 billion in revenue in 2025 and $385 billion in 2025. Numbers like that make AAPL a top stock on Robinhood and a favorite of retail and institutional investors everywhere.
Nvidia Corp. (NVDA)
Nvidia has been at the forefront of technology investing since late 2022, when large language model artificial intelligence (AI) systems became widely available and the investing public realized the incredible potential of AI.
NVDA designs and manufactures the graphic, computing and networking chips that make AI systems so impressively fast and efficient. The commercial applications for NVDA’s solutions are vast. They cover gaming, automotive, high-speed computing, entertainment, robotics, medicine and much more. As you might imagine, demand for the company’s products is increasing at an astounding rate.
Enthusiasm for AI and NVDA stock has driven the market cap of this 31-year-old company up to over $2.6 trillion.
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Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)
With a monster market cap of $1.7 trillion, AMZN is the largest and most famous online retailer in the world.
This Seattle-based company sells all types of consumer products on its website and through a small number of brick-and-mortar stores in North America. It also sells products through international subsidiaries in every developed nation around the globe.
In addition to its third-party retail offerings, AMZN offers a wide range of branded electronic devices such as the Amazon Kindle e-reader, the Ring doorbell camera, eero wifi systems and the Alexa smart-home system.
On top of all that, Amazon Web Services, better known as AWS, is the dominant player in the cloud computing infrastructure space. Numbers are hard to pin down, but it’s estimated that AWS has captured between 30% and 35% of the global market share for that important and growing industry.
Ford Motor Co. (F)
F is one of the Big Three automakers, along with General Motors Co. (GM) and Stellantis NV (STLA). The company has a market cap of $39 billion, and analysts expect revenue of $157 billion in 2024 and $158 billion in 2025.
There are two reasons you will consistently find F among the most popular stocks on Robinhood. First, the company’s board of directors is committed to paying a healthy annual dividend. Currently, the stock’s annual forward dividend is 60 cents a share, for a yield of 5.4%. That’s a respectable yield for a company in the consumer cyclical sector.
The second reason Ford is popular on Robinhood is the company’s sustained push into the EV market. Investors are betting that the company can leverage awareness of iconic brands like the Mustang sports car and the Ford F-150 truck into EV sales as it rolls out electric versions of those popular vehicles.
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)
MSFT is one of the most recognized names in the technology sector. This $3 trillion mega-cap company develops and sells hardware, software, computing and gaming services and business productivity tools to individual and commercial technology consumers all over the world.
Among its most popular and profitable products are the Microsoft Office software suite that is sold in conjunction with an annual subscription to Microsoft 365, but that is only a sampling of what MSFT offers.
The company has a whole division devoted to intelligent cloud computing infrastructure. Its premiere cloud computing product, known as the Azure platform, is steadily taking market share from Amazon’s AWS segment, and the Microsoft Windows operating system remains dominant in the personal computing space.
Wall Street is looking for $256 billion in revenue from MSFT in 2024 and $292 billion in 2025.
GameStop Corp. (GME)
GME is in a relatively new category of popular trading vehicles known as meme stocks. In fact, GME may be the original meme stock.
GME is a $9 billion retailer that has been specializing in selling computer games and digital entertainment online and through its network of over 4,000 brick-and-mortar locations in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe since its founding in 1996. Despite generating $5.7 billion in revenue in 2023, the company has struggled to remain viable in the age of cloud computing and streaming.
GME is popular on Robinhood and with speculative traders everywhere because of the ever-present possibility that the stock will very quickly — possibly without warning — be driven much higher if and when the many short sellers in the name find it necessary to buy it back in huge quantities.
The phenomenon is known as a short squeeze and, if you’re on the right side of one, it can make you boatloads of money. A GME short squeeze can happen at any time because a large percentage of the public float has been sold short and is effectively owed rather than owned. If GME goes down and short sellers get margin calls or simply panic, investors who are long GME and time their trades right will greatly benefit.
But, beware. GME is a highly speculative stock. Money can be lost buying this stock as fast as it can be made.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. (AMC)
AMC is a $1.8 billion movie theater company that earned $4.8 billion in revenues in 2023. Those are impressive sales numbers considering the challenges the theater business has been experiencing. Still, even though Wall Street is expecting annual revenue to climb to $5.2 billion in 2025, no one believes the company will report positive earnings anytime soon.
AMC is popular on Robinhood and other platforms not for fundamental reasons, but for speculative ones. Traders on Robinhood are interested in this company for the possibility that its share price might be driven up in a short squeeze like the one mentioned with GME above. In simple terms, a short squeeze happens when a stock falls to a point where those who sold it short are forced to buy it back quickly and in large quantities.
AMC is a venerable American company that has been in business for 104 years, but the industry it operates in is being disrupted by new technologies and changing consumer behavior. AMC stock is probably not suitable for conservative investors.
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8 Robinhood Stocks Investors Are Buying Now originally appeared on usnews.com
Update 08/07/24: This story was published at an earlier date and has been updated with new information.
