Robinhood's Most Popular Stocks in 2022

2022 was a rough year for retail investors, no doubt about it.

In 2020, I asked my friend Casey if I could write a newsletter for a site he started called Robintrack.net—which grew with great fervor in the highly-online investing community.

Hundreds of readers consumed the oft-published newsletter that I published, which included some brief summaries and glimpses of data from Robintrack.net.

Since then, this newsletter has evolved beyond Robintrack—in large part because Robinhood made the decision to revoke access to its user holdings API at the end of 2020. Though disappointing, I never cared much: I never stopped tracking Robinhood’s user holdings data, nor some of the finer points of the retail investors’ second lives on other broker-dealers.

As a result, I’ve been able to issue an annual report about the broker-dealer’s top stocks at the end of 2020, 2021, and 2022. This has become one of my most entertaining side projects (and one that I’m sure has made me very popular at the watercooler at Robinhood HQ… not.)

In 2020, I assessed that an index of the top 100 stocks on the platform would have doubled in 2020.

In 2021, the list’s past and present constituents returned a median return of 8%, not exactly market-beating. However, given that growth stocks began struggling mid-year, this was a welcome development.

Of course, in 2022, everybody is hurting—and we’ll talk about what that means after we reflect on the list’s newcomers and losers:

What’s New?

In 2022, I counted 12 new members on the Robinhood Top 100—five of them were ETFs, the remainder were stocks.

The ETFs cropped up on the list at the last minute, a symptom of Robinhood’s long-awaited retirement product starting to roll out.

The retirement product includes a one-time 'recommendation' that helps users deploy deposits into ETFs like VWO 0.00%↑, VEA 0.00%↑, VYM 0.00%↑, and BND 0.00%↑. As a result, these diversified funds have ended up on the list, joining SPHD 0.00%↑ (which reentered the Top 100 in Q2.)

As for the remaining entries, which were all stocks, there were some pretty interesting changes:

• GOOG 0.00%↑ — Google's Class C stock joined its Class A compatriot on the list in Q2.

• $BRK.B - Berkshire Hathaway Class B stock reentered the Top 100 amid a resurgence in interest, perhaps fueled by the current macro conditions.

• SHOP 0.00%↑ — Shopify found its way onto the list as the stock entered a freefall this year.

• TGT 0.00%↑ — Robinhood users bought the Target dip in May, allowing it to make an appearance on the list.

• O 0.00%↑ — Realty Income Group, an S&P 500 REIT and Dividend Aristocrats name, got bought as real estate foes were amplified in Q3.

• QS 0.00%↑ — Solid state battery developer Quantumscape got more looks this year as its stock fell.

• APE 0.00%↑ — AMC's new preferred equity class, which was given to AMC shareholders in a dividend, entered the list as the company prepared to raise $190 million at year end.

What’s Gone?

What’s gone? Well, it’s hard to say—since things come and go. But in 2022, there are at least four big permanent changes. We’ll start with those:

There were two acquisitions in 2022:

• ZNGA 0.00%↑ — Take-Two finished its $12.7 billion acquisition of Zynga in May. It ended the year +15.2%.

• TWTR 0.00%↑ — Elon Musk finished his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. It ended the year +34%.

And there were two companies which reorganized or changed their name:

• NRZ 0.00%↑ —> RITM 0.00%↑ — New Residential Investment Corp., a U.S. based REIT reorganized as Rithm Capital Corp.

• $FB 0.00%↑—> META 0.00%↑ - Facebook reorganized under its new parent company, Meta Platforms Inc.

Though the former is a little more permanent than the latter, this feels like as good a place as any to talk about the handoff between companies—and that leads us into the portion of this writeup where you can start playing Ava Maria.

Here are the remaining companies which fell out of the list, as far as I can tell:

• ACB 0.00%↑ — Aurora Cannabis had a really bad year and fell off the live list. It was one of the worst-performing stocks on the list in 2023, down 84%.

• CENN 0.00%↑ — Cenntro Electric Group was a popular small-cap stock among retail investors, but it suffered the worst performance on the list—falling over 90% in 2022.

• GNUS 0.00%↑ — Genius Brands was another popular penny stock, and though it didn’t have as bad of a year as Aurora or Cenntro, investors showed it to the door. It fell off early in 2022 and ended the year down -49%.

• GSAT 0.00%↑ — Globalstar has been off and on the Robinhood Top 100 over the last few years, in part because of interest around its recent work with Apple. In spite of staying in the green since its weak 2020 (-41%), a superb 2021 (+241%) and a surprisingly strong 2022 (+16%) was not enough to keep investors invested.

• IDEX 0.00%↑ — Ideanomics is another popular penny stock from Robinhood, an decades-old electric vehicle company. After a shoddy 2021 (-41%), investors largely abandoned EV aspirants like Ideanomics. In retrospect, that was smart—it finished 2022 down -88%.

• OCGN 0.00%↑ — Ocugen, a stock popularized by its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, fell off the list after interest in COVID-era stocks continued to wane throughout 2022.

• OGI 0.00%↑ — Organigram was one of the cannabis growers popularized on Robinhood. Like other weed producers, Organigram fell out of fervor with investors this year—another failed promise of the cannabiz.

• PENN 0.00%↑ — PENN Entertainment became a hot name during the pandemic after purchasing 36% of new media giant Barstool Sports. However, after exercising exercised its option to purchase the remainder of the company in August, the media-casino-sports gambling player plummeted. It fell more than 15% from the acquisition to the close of the year.

• WKHS 0.00%↑ — Workhorse Group was considered a popular pick to win a contract to produce electric delivery vehicles for USPS. It had already secured partnerships with rivals UPS and FedEx when it was ultimately passed over in early 2021. Since then, the stock has been falling—and in December, it hit a three-year low.

• ZOM 0.00%↑ — Zomedica was a scrappy penny stock when Carole Baskin of “Tiger King” fame was paid to do a $299 Cameo ‘promoting’ the company. The memeworthy feature saw the company to radical popularity among retail investors. After the price explosion, the Zomedica crowd appears to have gradually lost its passion.

What’s changed?

Unlike in 2020 and 2021, the most memorable newcomers aren’t growth stocks, SPACs, or IPOs. Instead, they’re large-cap companies and ETFs.

In the three-ish years I’ve been watching Robinhood on… whatever level you want to call this… I have found that the Robinhood crowd really seems to enjoy thematic, trend-oriented investing.

This might have been popularized in part by ARK Invest, crowd-following behavior, or a lack of experience. However, the retail crowd—at least in aggregate—seemed to know where the money was. They were on top of the oil trade, the reopening play, and other interesting trades in varying degrees.

This year’s top 100 seems to reflect a different kind of Robinhood, though.

Sure, there are still relics of the degen-era stockpicking Robinhood that we came to know throughout 2020 and 2021. After all, GameStop and AMC Entertainment still linger in the Top 100—and AMC’s new pseudo-preferred class of shares even joined the list this year.

But the new additions in the top 100 seem to be more an indictment of Robinhood’s product changes than a change in retail investing behavior.

There are less than half as many newcomers in the Top 100 this year compared to last year—and five of the 12 new ‘top 100 stocks’ are ETFs.

That, of course, might be heralded as excellent news at Robinhood HQ. The company’s serendipitous rise was a circumstance of robust and highly unsustainable retail trading. Their solution is making that retail trading more sustainable—and predictable. (You’ll want to subscribe or share with your friends for when I write about that next time…)

The Take

Nearly two years after pulling the API data that powered Robintrack.net, Robinhood finally announced an index product for its Top 100 list in 2022: the Robinhood Investor Index.

Robinhood’s first-ever index is weighted based on ‘conviction,’ which it defines as “the percentage of each investment in [the user’s] portfolios.”

This distinction has allowed Robinhood to represent its userbase as doing fairly well in its stockpicking ventures. Up until mid-2022, their index had a small premium over its comparable, the Nasdaq Composite.

However, from just a quick collating of the year-end top 100 list, I’m surprised that this index looks so well. Just 9 of the top 100 stocks in the year-end list ended in the positive.

That said, I aim to be consistent with my own sleuthing of the Top 100—and so the list I have scrounged together in both 2020 and 2021 includes past and present constituents in an effort to better understand Robinhood investors’ long-term engagement with stocks which have ever reached the point of being deemed ‘retail popular.’

That makes my list a little different—and maybe even more representative. A Robinhood user is unlikely to own all top 100 stocks on Robinhood. But, factually speaking, they probably own a few of the most popular stocks.

So, let’s assume we’re throwing darts at a board here: what is the median return they should expect if they randomly chose one of those top 100?

Consider, in 2022:

• The highest-performing stock from the Top 100 was Catalyst Pharmaceuticals, +183%.

• The worst-performing stock from the Top 100 was Cenntro Electric Group, -91.8%.

• If you bought any past or present member of the top 100 list on Jan. 2, 2022, the median performance of that stock would’ve been -45% in the year.

After taking score of the changes we’ve seen in 2022, I expect the list will shed many of its lower market capitalization stocks if the macro condition holds (or worsens) in 2023.

The Neat Bow at the End

Thanks for reading the 2022 edition of the Robintrack ‘Top 100’ roundups-of-sorts. This really has been an enjoyable project for me over the last few years and I’m hopeful that this year, I’ll be able to touch on Robinhood and other fintechs in an interesting capacity in this newsletter—which I will host on beehiiv going forward.

That said, you’re welcome to share this with your friends and I’ll export you guys once we get there…