The class of investors that chose a dog wearing a tie as its avatar during the original “GameStop to the moon” days now looks and acts a lot more like your parents.

Last year, individual investors outperformed the S&P 500, relegating the “dumb money” stereotype against them to the pandemic-era zeitgeist for good. The Goldman Sachs 2025 “retail favorites” basket of stocks gained 30.5% on the year, compared to the S&P 500’s 16.4% rise—the third consecutive year the retail basket did better.

Twenty-somethings, in particular, are increasingly moving significant amounts of money from checking accounts to investing accounts. More than 33% of 25-year-olds did so in 2024, up from 6% in 2015, according to recent data from JPMorgan.

Where they stash their cash: Five years ago, retail investors made buying the dip cool. Now, they’ve made it respectable by strategically targeting tech stocks, with Nvidia, Amazon, Reddit, AppLovin, Palantir, and Tesla as big favorites. The other company Elon Musk runs—SpaceX—is bound to be another popular selection once it goes public (as soon as next month).

In certain investment circles, it seems like everyone already owns SpaceX. That’s thanks to special purpose vehicles (SPVs), legal entities designed to allow an investment group to make a single investment in private company stock:

• SPVs are tightly regulated because they are riskier—and more opaque—than public market assets. SPVs can also invest in other SPVs, so individual investors don’t always know how far removed they are from the actual asset.
• According to the New York Times, at least 170 SPVs related to SpaceX have been set up since 2020. “How many investors in America think they own a chunk of SpaceX when they’re actually funding their ex-roommate’s boyfriend’s coke habit in Miami?” Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm mused on a recent podcast.

He’s not the only one questioning what some retail investors are up to. “We’ve never had people in a more gambling mood than now,” the OG individual investor advocate, Warren Buffett, said at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting last weekend. “If you’re buying one-day options or selling them, that’s not investing.”—HVL