GameStop has been one of the most-bought stocks amongst Hargreaves Lansdown investors in 10 of the past 12 months since investors rushed to buy shares in the company in early 2021, despite the fleeting era of the meme stock appearing to be over.
The surge of interest in the company, which saw its share price leap of almost 400% within a week in February 2021, was driven by investors collaborating online to outsmart Wall Street investors.
Hedge funds that tried profiting from short selling stocks in GameStop instead made huge losses when users of the WallStreetBets subreddit bought shares in the company en masse.
The new data by Hargreaves Lansdown reveals that the sensation many analysts thought was short-lived, has in fact remained popular across the year.
Shares in GameStop are up 25% over the past year, and the value of AMC, another company that online investors used to trick big firms, has doubled.
Share price of GameStop and AMC over past year
Source: Google Finance
Over the past 13 months from the start of 2021, GameStop was among the top 10 most-bought stocks through Hargreaves in 11 months, while AMC appeared in six.
Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown said that the investing trend that began as “a new form of entertainment among young investors” has led to a larger interest in finance.
She said: “The average age of people investing for the first time is falling and there is an unstoppable shift to digital trading, opening the financial markets to new investors, which is an encouraging trend.”
In the past three years, a third of Hargreaves Lansdown clients who joined to buy shares have now added other products to their portfolios, with 12.5% of 18-29 year old investors putting money into funds within nine months of joining.
Streeter said that this form of long-term investment in funds is far safer than short selling and encouraged new investors to listen to “industry experts with years of experience, rather than influencers targeting a quick buck.”
Meme stocks are not the only trend that has kept pace however as an Abrdn study in January revealed 39% of young investors held crypto assets in their portfolios. At the time, Streeter backed calls by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for tougher restrictions on high-risk investments.