Teenagers Are Pouring Into the Stock Market

The boom in teen trading is part of a wider rush to financial markets since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic

By Hannah Miao and Gunjan Banerji | Photographs by Gabby Jones for The Wall Street Journal
April 4, 2024
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When she started making money as a social-media content creator three years ago, Sophia Castiblanco’s 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.

The 17-year-old high school junior in the Chicago suburbs now has several thousand dollars invested in accounts set up by her father at Charles Schwab, Edward Jones and Robinhood.

“I’ve always had a business mindset of wanting to make money, and I’m very OK with taking risk,” said Sophia, who invests in stocks such as Tesla, Apple and Amazon.com. “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.

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.

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.

Mahanth Komuravelli

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.

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 that now has about $1,000 in it.

Kaida Benes with her brother.

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.

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.”

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.

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

Photo Editor: Alexandra Citrin-Safadi
Produced by Brian Patrick Byrne

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