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Top 20 trades on the NASDAQ in 2019 - Sharesight20

by David Olsen, Senior Marketing Manager — Content/SEO, Sharesight | Jan 23rd 2020
Disclaimer: The below article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute a product recommendation, or taxation or financial advice and should not be relied upon as such. Please check with your financial adviser or accountant to obtain the correct advice for your situation.

In this Sharesight20 yearly trading snapshot we look at the 20 most traded stocks by Sharesight users on the NASDAQ in 2019 and examine how they performed during the year.

Let’s dive into 2019’s top 20 trades.

Sharesight20 top 20 NASDAQ trades in 2019

Top 20 NASDAQ

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Investors using Sharesight bought and sold Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) stock significantly more often than any other stock listed on the NASDAQ in 2019. Among the top 5, trades roughly correlate with company market cap with the exception with the exception of Tesla (22nd by market cap) which jumped ahead of Facebook (4th by market cap) with investors buying into Elon Musk’s vision for the electric car maker.

Now let’s look at the performance of these stocks in 2019.

Top 20 NASDAQ trades in 2019 - investment performance

To calculate the performance of these stocks during 2019 we built a Sharesight portfolio domiciled in the same country as the exchange (to remove the impact of currency fluctuations) that contained these 20 stocks and invested an equally weighted (5% of the total portfolio) amount in each stock on January 1st 2019 (or the first listed date for stocks that listed after that date).

We then ran Sharesight’s Performance Report to calculate the portfolio’s 2019 performance. Here’s the results, ordered by Total Return.

Code Name Capital Gain % Dividends % Total Return %
AMD Advanced Micro Devices Inc. 148.43% 0.00% 148.43%
TTD Trade Desk Inc - Ordinary Shares - Class A 123.95% 0.00% 123.95%
AAPL Apple Inc 86.92% 1.94% 88.85%
OKTA Okta Inc - Ordinary Shares - Class A 81.11% 0.00% 81.11%
NVDA NVIDIA Corp 76.39% 0.48% 76.87%
MSFT Microsoft Corporation 55.83% 1.87% 57.70%
MDB MongoDB Inc - Ordinary Shares - Class A 57.17% 0.00% 57.17%
FB Facebook Inc - Ordinary Shares - Class A 56.20% 0.00% 56.20%
SBUX Starbucks Corp. 36.31% 2.31% 38.62%
TEAM Atlassian Corporation Plc - Ordinary Shares - Class A 35.24% 0.00% 35.24%
INTC Intel Corp. 27.53% 2.69% 30.22%
GOOG Alphabet Inc - Ordinary Shares - Class C 29.10% 0.00% 29.10%
PYPL PayPal Holdings Inc 28.71% 0.00% 28.71%
ATVI Activision Blizzard Inc 27.73% 0.80% 28.53%
GOOGL Alphabet Inc - Ordinary Shares - Class A 28.18% 0.00% 28.18%
TSLA Tesla Inc 25.62% 0.00% 25.62%
AMZN Amazon.com Inc. 23.03% 0.00% 23.03%
NFLX NetFlix Inc 20.92% 0.00% 20.92%
CSCO Cisco Systems, Inc. 10.69% 3.18% 13.87%
BYND Beyond Meat Inc 13.34% 0.00% 13.34%
Total 49.49% 0.66% 50.15%

Computer CPU and graphics chipmaker AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) was the standout performer with returns of 148.43% in 2019. Among the top 20 trades, 7 of the companies paid (relatively modest) dividends in 2019, with many companies opting to use capital to reinvest in growth.

Overall an equally weighted portfolio of these 20 stocks would have performed strongly with a 50.15% return during 2019.

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