Market Forces

 

- Ainsley Harris

Dallas resident Steven Card has a thing for Costco hot dogs. “Every time I go, I Snapchat the sign, [telling friends,] ‘I’m here again!’ ” he says.

So when the 26-year-old started trading stocks through Robinhood—an online brokerage that launched in 2014—it made sense to him to buy shares of both Costco and Snap, Snapchat’s newly public parent company. Card’s other stock holdings follow a similar pattern: Ford (there’s one in his garage), AMD (maker of the graphics card in his computer), and Anheuser-Busch InBev (cheers to that).

“If I’ve never heard of the company, I don’t usually feel comfortable buying it,” says Card, who further vets his trades by reading financial statements and texting with a group of childhood friends who have also become Robinhood fans. When a popular company like Tesla posts earnings, they discuss the news: “I’ve known these people for years, but we never talked about this stuff before Robinhood.”

While older generations may invest for the sake of retirement, Robinhood’s users, 78% of whom are under age 35, want to both build their savings and develop relationships with brands—just as they have on Instagram and Twitter. “People care about these companies,” says Robinhood cofounder Baiju Bhatt. It’s the millennial version of the baby boomer mantra “Buy what you know.”