Wall Street vs. Reddit: How Global Online Communities Are Shaping Investment Trends

The initial momentum behind investment strategies is increasingly being generated via online platforms like Reddit, with new young investors constantly turning to the website. There are over half a billion Reddit users worldwide with a proven power to – at least temporarily – reshape the market. With Reddit serving as the sounding board for millions of investors worldwide, what direction could the platform take the financial world in next?

To find out more, the forex broker experts at BrokerChooser conducted an in-depth study by analysing 5.8 million Reddit comments surrounding stocks and investment.

Key Findings:

• Nvidia is the most talked-about stock on Reddit (6,060 mentions), with nearly twice as many mentions as the second-place company.

• Technology stocks dominate the conversation, making up 63% of the top 20 most-discussed stocks possibly driven heavily by AI hype, followed by finance and healthcare.

• While stocks take the spotlight, Redditors also show a positive outlook on safer investment options like bonds and savings.

The five most talked about stocks (2025)

*The full data set is available to view here.

Nvidia (NVDA) is the most mentioned stock on Reddit (6,060 mentions) in 2025. It has seen a strong surge in both stock performance and investor interest in recent months, and estimates state it is currently trading at about 40 times its expected earnings. NVDA has nearly twice as many mentions as that of Toronto Dominion Bank (TD) in second place (3,217), and TD’s shares have already gained 34% so far in 2025. Reddit’s strong support of NVDA suggests the interest towards the organisation  will not be slowing anytime soon.

TD is currently the 146th largest stock in the world, but the 2nd most talked about stock on Reddit, and has seen steady growth since the beginning of the year. There could be potential for this to be the next Reddit investment darling, with Toronto Dominion Bank being mentioned more times than the likes of tech giants Apple and Microsoft.

The bank has likely also seen a surge of mentions across the forum due to its historic settlement in late 2024 following regulatory actions over anti–money laundering compliance failures, and it’s likely other consumer-focused brands will be mentioned more often online, as clients naturally have greater brand familiarity and direct experiences that can shape their personal opinions or even investment decisions.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Nvidia’s direct competitor) is in third, with 2,867 mentions on Reddit. Since launching its Zen-based Ryzen processors in 2017, AMD has regained significant market share compared to competitors like Intel.

Despite being the third most discussed stock on Reddit, AMD is the 41st largest stock by marketcap, demonstrating a clear difference between Reddit trends and company value. This demonstrates Reddit’s clear preference for tech related stocks, which make up 63% of the top 20 most-discussed stocks. This is potentially driven heavily by hype around AI.

Philip Morris International Inc. (PM) is fourth, with 2,213 mentions on Reddit. PM has seen a significant surge in both stock performance and investor interest in recent months, and is one of the top-performing large-cap stocks this year.

In fifth, one of the biggest names in technology, Apple Inc., has just over 2,000 mentions. Recently, Apple stocks have risen by 9%, partly due to the company benefiting from the growth of Apple Intelligence.

Most popular types of investments (2024)

Stocks are still the go-to investment for most Redditors, as they saw a huge 112,583 mentions in 2024. Stock investments carry a mostly neutral sentiment on Reddit, reflecting their inherent risks and the fact that they’re not the best fit for every investor. Stocks have around 90,000 more mentions than that of Crypto in second place.

Crypto follows behind Stocks, with 20,107 mentions. Crypto has become one of the most popular discussion topics on Reddit, gaining traction both in mentions and positive sentiment in recent years.

However, crypto sentiment took a sharp negative turn in 2023, likely driven by the collapse of major cryptocurrencies and the confusion surrounding NFTs and meme coins at the time. Crypto can be volatile, as can the hype around it, but overall it’s been gaining steady popularity and has an upward trend in Reddit mentions. In fact, between 2023 and 2024, mentions of crypto more than doubled from 9,545 to 20,107.

Redditors also show a positive outlook on safer investment options like savings and bonds, which fall into third and fourth place, having 13,142, and 8,122 mentions respectively. Bonds and fixed deposits (savings accounts) aren’t discussed nearly as much as stocks or crypto, however, the sentiment around them has been consistently positive across the years analysed, and in 2024, this positive sentiment averages around 82%.

Balázs Faluvégi, on behalf of forex broker experts at BrokerChooser, has provided expert insight into the data, and comments on how Reddit could shape investment trends:

“Reddit discussions highlight the disproportionate visibility of mega-cap tech stocks like NVIDIA and Apple, which benefit from brand recognition and strong narratives (AI, consumer tech). While some large, fundamentally strong companies receive less attention, this reflects not a dismissal of their value but the platform’s preference for high-volatility, high-story assets.

Sentiment on Reddit is not monolithic: while Apple and Microsoft attract broadly positive views as ‘core’ stocks, others like Philip Morris and UnitedHealth can split opinion sharply. The gap between market weight and Reddit visibility suggests that retail investors’ attention is not always aligned with institutional allocation, though spikes in attention have historically preceded thematic momentum.

By 2025, sentiment data from forums like r/stocks and r/options has become a legitimate input in trading strategies, particularly for momentum and volatility forecasting. Looking ahead, the integration of retail sentiment with macro and technical signals is likely to enhance market intelligence, offering investors a richer view of both short-term psychology and long-term thematic trends.”

Methodology:

1. Brokerchooser conducted this study to examine Reddit sentiment around investing and financial instruments.

2. To capture financial discussions on Reddit, data was collected from two major finance-related subreddits: r/investing and r/personalfinance. The dataset consists of approximately 5.8 million comments, covering the period from January 1, 2023, to the present.

3. The classification and sentiment analysis process involved the following steps:

   1. Distant supervision learning method was used where the raw comments were first processed using a rule-based approach, applying predefined keyword lists to identify mentions of different financial instruments – Stocks, Bonds, Savings, Gold, Crypto, Forex, and Meme coins.

   2. Comments successfully tagged with this were used as training data for a text based ML classifier to “understand the language” associated with each instrument.

   3. This trained model is then used to classify the remaining comments in the dataset.

   4. For sentiment analysis, VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning) was used. VADER is a rule- and lexicon-based sentiment analysis tool specifically designed for short, informal text, such as social media. It produces positive, negative, neutral, and compound sentiment scores for each comment.

4. To analyse discussions around the most talked-about stocks, NASDAQ-listed company data was incorporated. Companies with a market capitalization above $10 billion in the technology, healthcare, finance, and energy sectors were selected. Case-sensitive stock tickers were then matched against Reddit comments to measure the frequency of mentions and to assess sentiment associated with those tickers.

5. Note: The VADER sentiment scores are between -1 to +1, where -1 indicates extremely negative sentiment, +1 indicates extremely positive sentiment, and values around 0 reflect neutral sentiment.

   1. The mention counts and sentiment analysis of Reddit comments for 2025 are only available up to the current month (August) and are not yet complete for the full year.

   2. Since ticker symbols were matched through tokenized comments, some counts may be slightly inflated due to overlaps with common words or typographical errors.

   3. The Reddit investment trend analysis (2015–2024) is based solely on data from the r/investing subreddit. Historical comments and sentiment scores were extracted to provide a complete view of investment discussions, with no data included from r/personalfinance.

6. Data was collected August 2025 and is accurate as of then.