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Published: May 31, 2023 3 min read

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Gen Z, millennials and Gen X may not see eye to eye on a lot of topics, but here's one thing they all agree on: Their favorite stocks to own are the same seven tech companies, including the likes of Apple, Google and red-hot Nvidia.

Nvidia has been on a remarkable run this year, with its stock rising 164% year-to-date as it has grown to a nearly $1 trillion market cap. Nvidia is now among the top five most owned stocks across generations, according to a new report from Apex. The Silicon Valley-based chipmaking company's stock has boomed amid broader stock price growth for chipmakers and software companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) innovations.

In addition to Nvidia being one of the most held stocks, a separate report from Reuters found that it was one of the top-traded stocks among individual investors in May.

What the research says

Across three generations, the same seven stock tickers account for the largest shares of investors’ holdings.

  • For Gen Z, millennials and Gen X investors, the top stocks they are holding are the same seven companies: Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook).
  • Boomers diverge slightly from their younger counterparts and tend to own more stock in Netflix and AMD, a semiconductor company. Alphabet and Meta rank lower in boomers’ holdings.

How Gen Z is investing

The authors of the Apex report say Gen Z's investing behavior is important to study, even though these young investors (roughly age 27 and under) generally don't have much money in the markets yet compared to older generations

  • "This is a generation that invests in disruptors and against expected trends — and over $70 trillion in assets will be passed down to this generation in the coming decades," Connor Coughlin, an Apex executive, said in the report.
  • The three stocks that moved up the most among Gen Z investors in the first quarter of 2023 were Coinbase, Marathon Digital (another crypto company) and Crowdstrike, which is a cybersecurity firm.

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