The class of investors that chose a dog wearing a tie as its avatar during the original “GameStop to the moon” days now looks and acts a lot more like your parents.

Last year, individual investors outperformed the S&P 500, relegating the “dumb money” stereotype against them to the pandemic-era zeitgeist for good. The Goldman Sachs 2025 “retail favorites” basket of stocks gained 30.5% on the year, compared to the S&P 500’s 16.4% rise—the third consecutive year the retail basket did better.

Twenty-somethings, in particular, are increasingly moving significant amounts of money from checking accounts to investing accounts. More than 33% of 25-year-olds did so in 2024, up from 6% in 2015, according to recent data from JPMorgan.

Where they stash their cash: Five years ago, retail investors made buying the dip cool. Now, they’ve made it respectable by strategically targeting tech stocks, with Nvidia, Amazon, Reddit, AppLovin, Palantir, and Tesla as big favorites. The other company Elon Musk runs—SpaceX—is bound to be another popular selection once it goes public (as soon as next month).

That’s just the visible trade

In certain investment circles, it seems like everyone already owns SpaceX. That’s thanks to special purpose vehicles (SPVs), legal entities designed to allow an investment group to make a single investment in private company stock:

• SPVs are tightly regulated because they are riskier—and more opaque—than public market assets. SPVs can also invest in other SPVs, so individual investors don’t always know how far removed they are from the actual asset.
• According to the New York Times, at least 170 SPVs related to SpaceX have been set up since 2020. “How many investors in America think they own a chunk of SpaceX when they’re actually funding their ex-roommate’s boyfriend’s coke habit in Miami?” Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm mused on a recent podcast.

He’s not the only one questioning what some retail investors are up to. “We’ve never had people in a more gambling mood than now,” the OG individual investor advocate, Warren Buffett, said at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting last weekend. “If you’re buying one-day options or selling them, that’s not investing.”—HVL

The wealthy are parking their money in more fun places than they used to: trinkets and treats. Vintage video games, trading cards, rare wines, and other collectibles have gotten a massive influx of cash in recent years, setting new sales records as nostalgia drives Americans to buy cool li’l things as a hedge against market volatility.

A collection of things you probably can’t afford:

• In February, Logan Paul sold a rare Pikachu Illustrator card for $16.5 million, smashing the previous Pokémon card sale record that he set just five years earlier.
• A 1945 bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti sold for a record $812,500 in March, a 46% jump from its price eight years earlier.
• And, in 2021, the record for the most expensive video game was smashed when an anonymous buyer snagged a sealed copy of the 1985 game Super Mario Bros. for $2 million.

It’s not just nostalgia for the ’80s and ’90s. A yearning for the Jurassic period has the wealthy spending exorbitant amounts to own dinosaur bones. Since 2020, three nearly complete dinosaur fossils have fetched over $30 million apiece.

Remember Rembrandt? The booming collectible market stands in sharp contrast to the sputtering art market, which reported a global sales increase of just 4% last year after declining the previous year, according to the latest annual report from Art Basel and UBS.—MM

In some families, announcing “I’ll be in my office” isn’t a bathroom joke. More ultrawealthy folks than ever are establishing family offices—companies solely focused on managing one family’s cash.

Often with a headcount of a mom-and-pop bakery, family offices employ professional wealth managers who execute financial strategies and goals set by family members. They can also manage rich families’ chores, like doing taxes, paying bills, purchasing yachts, and booking travel.

While they’ve been around for centuries, family offices have proliferated in recent years like Birkin bags in the Hamptons:

• The number of family offices was projected to exceed 9,000 last year, and they managed $3.1 trillion in wealth as of 2024, according to Deloitte.
• Deloitte predicts that family offices will command $5.4 trillion in assets by 2030, surpassing hedge funds.

What do they invest in? While they trade stocks and bonds just like anyone with a Robinhood account, family offices are increasingly moving into private dealmaking and hoovering up real estate. Industry experts say they’re often more risk-tolerant than established investment firms and can rely on family connections to access lucrative deals.

Some are uniting…with families pooling their resources into multifamily offices to share investment tips and combine financial firepower for deals.—SK

If you’re a wealthy investor with an appetite for growth, women’s sports are looking a lot like a giant pork chop right now. According to McKinsey, from 2022 to 2024, women’s sports grew 4.5 times faster than men’s sports, and the party is expected to continue:

• By 2030, McKinsey predicts that US women’s sports will generate at least $2.5 billion.
• Compare that to 2024, when they generated about $1 billion.

That growth comes as fans break attendance records—and marketers have taken notice. The WNBA and National Women’s Soccer League’s combined sponsorships jumped nearly 33% last year, Reuters reported, citing SponsorUnited.

Billionaire ball: Last week, CNBC valued the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries at $1 billion—the first time a women’s team in any sport has been in the billionaire’s club. The team’s purchase price in 2023 was just $50 million.—BC

Like cornflakes or vapes, sometimes exchange-traded funds (ETFs) need colorful packaging in order to sell. Case in point: The UFO Disclosure ETF (known as UFOD) launched earlier this year as a way to invest in companies that might one day reverse-engineer alien tech.

According to the fund’s website:

• Tuttle Capital, UFOD’s issuer, built it around the companies “most likely to benefit from a government confirmation and the subsequent commercialization of non-human technology.”
• That translates to lots of aerospace, defense tech, and energy firms. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Palantir are among the fund’s biggest holdings.

“It can exist without there being aliens,” Tuttle’s CEO told Bloomberg, adding that a lot of the ETF’s stocks are popular investing picks anyway. So, it’s not necessarily banking on aircraft blueprints coming out in the Pentagon’s next release of UFO files.

Honorable mentions: Other strange ETFs include VICE, a collection of tobacco, gambling, alcohol, and food companies; and WWJD, a fund for investing in “biblically aligned” non-US stocks, which in this case includes many energy companies.—ML