These Teenagers Know More About Investing Than You Do

Seventeen-year-old Sophia Castiblanco doesn’t just drive a Tesla . She also owns shares of the company .

Sophia, a high school junior in the Chicago suburbs, invests in stocks such as Tesla, Apple and Amazon.com. When she started making money as a social-media content creator three years ago, her parents encouraged her to put some of her earnings in investments likely to grow over time, rather than parking all her cash in a savings account .

She now has several thousand dollars invested in accounts set up by her father at Charles Schwab, Edward Jones and Robinhood . Last year, she saved up money to buy a new Tesla Model 3, which starts at around $40,000, through a payment plan she is splitting with her parents. On TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, she makes videos teaching her thousands of followers about investing basics.

“I’ve always had a business mindset of wanting to make money, and I’m very OK with taking risk,” Sophia said. “There’s really no minimum age to start.”

Sophia is one of many teenagers jumping into the U.S. stock market. Teens generally can’t open their own brokerage accounts until they turn 18, but adults can set up custodial accounts for minors. The accounts are turned over to the children when they reach legal age.

Custodial accounts for teens at Schwab totalled nearly 200,000 in 2022, up from about 120,000 in 2019, according to the company. They jumped above 300,000 in 2023, thanks in part to Schwab’s integration of TD Ameritrade. Other brokerages, including Vanguard, Fidelity and Morgan Stanley’s E*Trade, also reported a surge in custodial accounts in recent years.

Some teens ask their parents to open accounts—and share the login information—at brokerages such as Robinhood that don’t offer custodial accounts. At smaller financial apps such as Greenlight, teenagers are investing more money than ever before. They invested $20 million in 2023 using the Greenlight app, up from around $10 million in 2021.

A Fidelity study on teens and money recently estimated that about a quarter of teenagers in the U.S. have started investing, based on an online survey of 2,081 respondents ages 13 to 17. Trades placed using Fidelity’s Youth app, an account opened by parents but owned by teens, jumped in the fourth quarter.

Many teenagers opened up their accounts during winter break while off from school, said Kelly Lannan, a senior vice president at Fidelity.

The boom in teen trading is part of a wider rush to financial markets among Americans since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Stocks rocketed higher , drawing hordes of newbie investors trying to profit from the big gains.

Many of those new investors have since ditched the meme stocks that soared during that era but have remained invested, sending the share of Americans who own stocks to an all-time high.

Stocks are back at record levels, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average recently topping 38000 and the S&P 500 eclipsing 5000 for the first time. Since the start of 2020, when an unprecedented trading boom among rookie investors kicked off, the S&P 500 has soared around 55%.

“There’s just more and more awareness that the sooner you start, the better things are,” said James Martielli, head of investment and trading services at Vanguard.

Martielli said he opened custodial accounts for his three children more than a decade ago when they were toddlers. At Vanguard, there has been a jump in custodial IRAs, a type of retirement account.

The biggest advantage is time. Setting aside $10 a week for a child at birth would leave an 18-year-old with a roughly $20,000 nest egg, assuming an 8% annual return, according to the investing app Stash, which offers custodial accounts. Left until the investor turned 70, and assuming annual growth of 8%, that sum would mushroom to about $1 million.

Of course, these returns can be shaped by many factors, including when an investor buys in and how stocks end up doing. The S&P 500 has recorded a 10% annualised total return over the past three decades, according to Dow Jones Market Data through the end of 2023. Buying an S&P 500 index fund at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 2000 would generate an annualised total return of around 7%, while buying at the low of the financial crisis in 2009 would lead to a roughly 16% annualised total return.

Hot tech stocks

Brokerage executives say that technology behemoths that are ubiquitous in the lives of teens are often some of the most widely held shares. At Vanguard, U.S. stock index funds are particularly popular in custodial accounts.

Mahanth Komuravelli, 16, has a small chunk of his roughly $7,000 portfolio in an S&P 500 index fund, while most of his positions are in big companies such as Amazon and Advanced Micro Devices. He is exploring buying some small-cap stocks such as education company Chegg . Mahanth uses a Fidelity Youth Account that his father helped him open. The two often discuss investment ideas.

“Sometimes he asks me for advice,” said Mahanth, a high school junior in Edison, N.J.

Kaida Benes, a 13-year-old from the suburbs of Minneapolis, has been stashing money—earned from household chores such as doing the dishes or cleaning the bathroom—in an investment account on Greenlight that now has about $1,000 in it.

She’s also been drawn to bigger companies and has invested in tech stocks such as Apple, Alphabet and streaming companies Disney and Netflix . At times, she has been on edge about potential losses. She says her mother has helped her stomach the volatility.

“Stocks go up and down. It’s fine, it just happens,” Kaida said she’s learned.

She has been hunting for other opportunities to make money to pour into savings or investments. She recently found a recliner chair at a yard sale and enlisted her parents to help fix it up and flip it for a profit on Facebook marketplace, she and her mother, Renee Benes, said.

“I like having money,” Kaida said.

Renee Benes said she was frustrated that she didn’t learn about investing until a year or two ago, when she was well into her 30s. Benes, who’s an online influencer, wanted her daughter and son to be more financially savvy.

Lessons learned

Many young investors are starting to invest earlier than previous generations did. Almost two-thirds of Gen Z investors said they first started learning about investing in high school or middle school, compared with about 38% of millennials in a 2023 Bank of America survey of affluent individuals. Some are introduced to stocks through family members or teachers, while others have turned to social media.

Felix Peng, a 17-year-old in the Los Angeles area, said he has learned a lot about investing from YouTube and Instagram—but that some social-media stars promote riskier trading strategies that seem more like gambling. He said it is a red flag when influencers try to sell expensive trading courses that promise investors they will make a lot of money quickly.

Still, Felix believes it is beneficial for young people to learn from their mistakes when they have less money to lose. His investments in Apple, Meta Platforms and Alphabet have performed well. But when he bought shares of Teladoc around their peak and watched them tumble, he saw how tough it is to time the market. He has about $1,000 in a custodial account on Stockpile, an investing app geared toward parents and children.

“It’s a great lesson and I’m glad I learned,” Felix said.

Seventeen-year-old Rachael Kim in Orange County, Calif., traded shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings during the meme-stock era and said she made a roughly 300% profit.

“For a little while, I got addicted to that adrenaline,” Rachael said of day trading. “But as I began researching more, I realized it was highly unlikely to continue that aggressive profit.”

Rachael said she started studying investing to help her parents, who are immigrants, prepare for retirement. Now she regularly invests about half of the money she makes—from creating social-media content, working as a cashier and teaching at her church—in index funds tracking the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq-100. She has about $10,000 in her custodial Roth IRA at Fidelity.

“Since we’re young, we have the privilege of seeing our investment compound,” Rachael said. “The biggest lesson would be to start early.”

For years, global companies showcased their Chinese operations as a source of robust growth. A burgeoning middle class, a stream of people moving to cities, and the creation of new services to cater to them—along with the promise of the further opening of the world’s second-largest economy—drew companies eager to tap into the action.

Then Covid hit, isolating China from much of the world. Chinese leader Xi Jinping tightened control of the economy, and U.S.-China relations hit a nadir. After decades of rapid growth, China’s economy is stuck in a rut, with increasing concerns about what will drive the next phase of its growth.

Though Chinese officials have acknowledged the sputtering economy, they have been reluctant to take more than incremental steps to reverse the trend. Making matters worse, government crackdowns on internet companies and measures to burst the country’s property bubble left households and businesses scarred.

Lowered Expectations

Now, multinational companies are taking a hard look at their Chinese operations and tempering their outlooks. Marriott International narrowed its global revenue per available room growth rate to 3% to 4%, citing continued weakness in China and expectations that demand could weaken further in the third quarter. Paris-based Kering , home to brands Gucci and Saint Laurent, posted a 22% decline in sales in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, in the first half amid weaker demand in Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Macau.

Pricing pressure and deflation were common themes in quarterly results. Starbucks , which helped build a coffee culture in China over the past 25 years, described it as one of its most notable international challenges as it posted a 14% decline in sales from that business. As Chinese consumers reconsidered whether to spend money on Starbucks lattes, competitors such as Luckin Coffee increased pressure on the Seattle company. Starbucks executives said in their quarterly earnings call that “unprecedented store expansion” by rivals and a price war hurt profits and caused “significant disruptions” to the operating environment.

Executive anxiety extends beyond consumer companies. Elevator maker Otis Worldwide saw new-equipment orders in China fall by double digits in the second quarter, forcing it to cut its outlook for growth out of Asia. CEO Judy Marks told analysts on a quarterly earnings call that prices in China were down roughly 10% year over year, and she doesn’t see the pricing pressure abating. The company is turning to productivity improvements and cost cutting to blunt the hit.

Add in the uncertainty created by deteriorating U.S.-China relations, and many investors are steering clear. The iShares MSCI China exchange-traded fund has lost half its value since March 2021. Recovery attempts have been short-lived. undefined undefined And now some of those concerns are creeping into the U.S. market. “A decade ago China exposure [for a global company] was a way to add revenue growth to our portfolio,” says Margaret Vitrano, co-manager of large-cap growth strategies at ClearBridge Investments in New York. Today, she notes, “we now want to manage the risk of the China exposure.”

Vitrano expects improvement in 2025, but cautions it will be slow. Uncertainty over who will win the U.S. presidential election and the prospect of higher tariffs pose additional risks for global companies.

Behind the Malaise

For now, China is inching along at roughly 5% economic growth—down from a peak of 14% in 2007 and an average of about 8% in the 10 years before the pandemic. Chinese consumers hit by job losses and continued declines in property values are rethinking spending habits. Businesses worried about policy uncertainty are reluctant to invest and hire.

The trouble goes beyond frugal consumers. Xi is changing the economy’s growth model, relying less on the infrastructure and real estate market that fueled earlier growth. That means investing aggressively in manufacturing and exports as China looks to become more self-reliant and guard against geopolitical tensions.

The shift is hurting western multinationals, with deflationary forces amid burgeoning production capacity. “We have seen the investment community mark down expectations for these companies because they will have to change tack with lower-cost products and services,” says Joseph Quinlan, head of market strategy for the chief investment office at Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank.

Another challenge for multinationals outside of China is stiffened competition as Chinese companies innovate and expand—often with the backing of the government. Local rivals are upping the ante across sectors by building on their knowledge of local consumer preferences and the ability to produce higher-quality products.

Some global multinationals are having a hard time keeping up with homegrown innovation. Auto makers including General Motors have seen sales tumble and struggled to turn profitable as Chinese car shoppers increasingly opt for electric vehicles from BYD or NIO that are similar in price to internal-combustion-engine cars from foreign auto makers.

“China’s electric-vehicle makers have by leaps and bounds surpassed the capabilities of foreign brands who have a tie to the profit pool of internal combustible engines that they don’t want to disrupt,” says Christine Phillpotts, a fund manager for Ariel Investments’ emerging markets strategies.

Chinese companies are often faster than global rivals to market with new products or tweaks. “The cycle can be half of what it is for a global multinational with subsidiaries that need to check with headquarters, do an analysis, and then refresh,” Phillpotts says.

For many companies and investors, next year remains a question mark. Ashland CEO Guillermo Novo said in an August call with analysts that the chemical company was seeing a “big change” in China, with activity slowing and competition on pricing becoming more aggressive. The company, he said, was still trying to grasp the repercussions as it has created uncertainty in its 2025 outlook.

Sticking Around

Few companies are giving up. Executives at big global consumer and retail companies show no signs of reducing investment, with most still describing China as a long-term growth market, says Dana Telsey, CEO of Telsey Advisory Group.

Starbucks executives described the long-term opportunity as “significant,” with higher growth and margin opportunities in the future as China’s population continues to move from rural to suburban areas. But they also noted that their approach is evolving and they are in the early stages of exploring strategic partnerships.

Walmart sold its stake in August in Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com for $3.6 billion after an eight-year noncompete agreement expired. Analysts expect it to pump the money into its own Sam’s Club and Walmart China operation, which have benefited from the trend toward trading down in China.

“The story isn’t over for the global companies,” Phillpotts says. “It just means the effort and investment will be greater to compete.”

Corrections & Amplifications

Joseph Quinlan is head of market strategy for the chief investment office at Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank. An earlier version of this article incorrectly used his old title.