Move over, Meme stocks: retail investors go back to the blue chips

1 min read . Updated: 30 Jan 2022, 06:35 PM IST PETER SANTILLI, The Wall Street Journal

Individual investors have returned to favoring broad market funds and shares of the biggest U.S. companies

A year ago, speculative stocks such as GameStop Corp. were some of the most-favored choices of individual investors. Since then, though, their tastes have changed.

Retail investors’ top picks now look more like they did in early 2020, when the roster of the most-popular U.S.-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds was made up almost entirely of shares of well-established companies in the benchmark S&P 500 and ETFs representing broad bets on U.S. stocks or bonds, according to data from VandaTrack.

As the pandemic progressed through 2020 and then 2021, shares of electric-vehicle companies and meme stocks popular on social media were among those that broke into the list of investments most popular with individual investors. More recently, though, those investors seem to be returning to traditional bets.

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This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text

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