Top of the stocks: most bought and sold stocks in February

They say you shouldn’t sit at your computer and watch stock markets if you’re an investor because it will make you panic – and I can see exactly what they mean. If being up-to-date on market movements is your job, having the discipline to keep calm and carry on is a real advantage.

That said, it’s been fascinating watching the mixed signals markets gave out last month. Anthropic’s family of large language models, Claude, was given some added bells and whistles. Claude Code now has a new plug-in that helps automate a swathe of routine legal and compliance tasks.

Investors decided that this is a terrible, terrible thing for any company offering services to the legal industry. The key players such as RELX (REL), Sage (SGE) and Wolters Kluwer (WKL) are down anywhere between 38% and 58% from recent highs.

Software stocks remain under pressure, too, as AI threatens to eat their lunch. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF, which includes Microsoft (MSFT), Palantir (PLTR) and Oracle (ORCL) as top holdings, is down c. 30% since peaking in September.

Yet, at the headline level, markets remain resilient. The FTSE 100 kept hitting record highs throughout the month, as did the FTSE All-World Index. Both have only narrowly come off those highs thanks to this week’s turmoil in the Middle East.

US markets have now started to plateau slightly, with the S&P 500 not having made any gains since late October now, despite not having really fallen significantly, either.

Top 10 most bought and sold shares in February

These were the most (and least) popular shares with UK retail investors on three of the largest investment platforms last month:

Source: AJ Bell, Bestinvest and interactive investor

Je m’appelle Claude

Investors have been reappraising the expected winners and losers from the AI race for a few months now, with the hyperscalers and software companies being at the vanguard.

The return on the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by the hyperscalers (those firms helping to finance the building of the physical AI infrastructure such as cloud services and data centres) has been thrown into question, hitting the likes of NVIDIA (NVDA), Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft. Will their investments be profitable and, if the eventual answer is yes, how long will that profitability take to appear?

As mentioned in the intro, software firms have been under pressure since September 2025 and that has intensified in recent weeks thanks to the risk that Claude will come along and eat their lunch, like the school bully.

This has all affected our most-bought list. Microsoft rejoined the list after a brief hiatus last month and has jumped into second place this time around, while Amazon leapfrogs into the list for, surprisingly, the first time.

RELX has been one of the darlings of the UK stock market for years now, but the share price had more than halved by mid-February. Rather than prompting retail investors to panic and flee, it brought out bargain hunters who seemingly saw a price-to-earnings ratio of c. 20× as attractive.

NVIDIA no more

The other big corollary of all of this was that NVIDIA dropped off the chart altogether, for the first time since June. The AI chipmaker extraordinaire featured in none of the top 10 lists on any platform.

The reaction to NVIDIA’s fourth-quarter results, released in late February, shows just how high the expectations are now for the Jensen Huang’s firm following its meteoric share price rise. Shares are up c. 1,345% in the past five years – great news for shareholders who bought in early, but probably a case of bringing forward most of its future growth.

Quarterly revenue was up 20% from the previous three-month period and full-year revenue – at c. $216bn (£161.5bn) was 65% higher than last year. The results were seemingly sensational, yet shares are down more than 10% since then.

Investors seem to be walking away from NVIDIA for now – could it be that they were only interested when the share price was rising?

Power banks

Elsewhere, UK banks have taken a bit of a hammering over the past month, too. Natwest (NWG) is down c. 16%, Lloyds (LLOY) is down c. 14% and Barclays (BARC) has plunged 22.5%.

Troubles in the private credit market may have spooked some, with the Financial Times having reported that Barclays had roughly £600m of exposure to the mortgage provider Market Financial Solutions, which collapsed last week.

The more domestic-focused Lloyds and Natwest have been hit, too. UK economic growth is looking anemic and some businesses are struggling thanks to tax and minimum wage hikes as well as the spiking oil price. In addition, the odds are tilted towards falling interest rates, which could stifle bank profits moving forward.

Still, although Barclays wasn’t in our top 10 list, it only narrowly missed out, perhaps being overlooked thanks to its lowly 2% yield, versus yields of c. 5.5% and 3.7% from Natwest and Lloyds respectively.

Top 10 most bought investment trusts in February

Moving onto investment trusts, and we’ve expanded our list to include the top 10 so that we can talk about different trusts – the top five doesn’t change often, but the next five does:

Source: AJ Bell, Bestinvest and interactive investor

Bonded together

With low-risk and defensive investments still in demand from many investors, a recent placing from Invesco Bond Income Plus (BIPS) was well received. The transaction, which was covered by a colleague here, raised £25m, which is unsurprising given BIPS’ c. 7% yield.

Given money market funds remain popular in OEIC-land despite falling yields, evidence of which you can see on our sister website Expert Investor, a dividend yield almost two-times higher than the Bank of England base rate certainly looks attractive, especially with the tremors we’ve seen recently in stock markets.

In space, no-one can hear you scream

One real success story of the past few years has been Seraphim Space (SSIT), which, as its name suggests, invests in space technology companies. SSIT hopes to harness the first-mover advantage and fully capture the massive growth potential in the space industry, which is projected by some to surpass $1trn by 2032.

After a steep fall prompted by rising inflation and interest rates, SSIT’s shares have rallied more than 400% since 2023 and are up c. 165% over 12 months. Having been trading at a c. 72% discount less than three years ago, SSIT is now on a 17.5% premium – a remarkable turnaround.

This eyewateringly impressive performance has evidently lured investors into the story and it’s rapidly climbed up our list to enter the top 10.

Any other business

Circling back to where we started, HgCapital (HGT) was another that got caught up in the software sell-off, with shares down 19.3% so far this year and c. 25% since its most recent high.

HGT’s largest holding is Visma, which provides payroll, HR and accounting software products for more than 2.2m customers in 28 countries. Visma may not have to delay an IPO that had previously been slated for Q1 2026, so you can see why some investors have been worried and some analysts downgraded HGT because of it.

There will undoubtedly be a negative impact on the net asset value (NAV) in the short term, but the dramatic widening of HGT’s discount to c. 30% (it was trading around par as recently as May) seems overdone, and retail investors seem to concur with this sentiment and have started buying the dip.

Outlook

The cracks we’ve seen starting to appear in markets have started with the highly valued US, but are now broadening out. UK, Japanese and emerging markets had been powering ahead of America for a while, but they’ve started to come off their recent record highs.

The Nikkei 225 is down c. 8.5%, for instance. The UK’s FTSE 100 has been more resilient, inching down c. 3.6%. With a confluence of factors now roiling markets, time will tell if we see them start to climb the famed wall of worry, or fall back down to earth.

In the meantime, investors would do well, as ever, to keep calm and carry on while only buying the dip judiciously.