00:00 Speaker A

For Investopedia folks, what are their top holdings?

00:02 Speaker B

Their top holdings look very much like the top of the Nasdaq 100. Nvidia is the top stock in almost all of their portfolios right now. Surprise, surprise. But you also have Apple there. You also have Microsoft. You also have Alphabet. You also, uh, have companies, uh, you know, that they’ve Palantir is big in their holdings right now, and Microsoft. And when we asked them what they’re holding now and what they would buy and hold for the next 10 years.

00:26 Speaker A

Yeah, what where do they want to put money to work? That’s

00:28 Speaker B

It looks very similar. Which concerns us a little and me at least, because we’re all kind of piling into the same things. But when you look at the top-performing stocks so far this year, almost all none of them are on that list except for Palantir. So a lot of everybody’s piling in to the same safety stocks that they’ve held for a very long time, probably sitting on gains and loath to sell them or try to transition to another sector, to another part of the market. Though we did see international stocks climb in terms of people’s attitude and what they’re buying lately, what they’re doing with their money, and also gold, renewed interest in gold with gold at a record high. Welcome to the party, but now they’re getting into it.

01:05 Speaker A

That’s interesting. I mean, gold enjoying a blistering run. So that made their list. Was that a shift, that interest in the metal or no?

01:13 Speaker B

When we asked them, what would you do with an extra 10 grand if you had it to invest? Their top three choices are individual stocks, and it’s kind of been that way for the past, I don’t know, six to seven months. ETFs, which is more of a diversified safety play there. and then gold. First time gold cracked the top five in the whole time we’ve been doing this survey, and we started this back in 2020.

01:35 Speaker A

Did you survey their thoughts on the Fed?

01:37 Speaker B

Yeah, we asked them about the Fed. Did you think the Fed is is handling monetary policy appropriately? Most people said yes. Do you want the Fed to remain independent? 79% said absolutely yes. Very important to Investopedia readers who are all individual retail investors that depend on the trust and the veracity and the independence of the central bank, but also they want to trust this government that they’re going to do the right thing for their portfolios.

02:04 Speaker A

On their list of worries did tariffs bubble up?

02:06 Speaker B

Tariffs is number one on that list. Tariffs and reciprocal tariffs followed by inflation, and then they’re worried about the accuracy of government data. That comes into full focus this Friday.

02:16 Speaker A

They are?

02:17 Speaker B

That’s interesting. Yeah, these are traditionalists who like things the way they are. They want to be able to look at data, make their investing decisions based on what’s happening in the economy, based on fundamentals. If you can’t trust the data, if you can’t trust what you’re hearing from our government agencies, it’s really hard to invest in that type of an environment.