Given that Robinhood Markets pioneered commission-free online trading, opening up investing like never before, it has become the mecca for retail investors.
At the end of the second quarter, the online brokerage had over 28 million funded customers on its platform, and Robinhood has also expanded its banking capabilities to offer a range of additional services.
With so many customers, Robinhood is a good place for investors to gauge retail sentiment. The company provides a list of its 100 most-owned investments on Robinhood called the Robinhood Investor Index.
A new artificial intelligence stock just cracked the top five.
Image source: Getty Images.
The largest IPO ever
Robinhood compiles its Robinhood Investor Index by looking at customer conviction, or the percentage of each investment in investors' portfolios. This considers all investors, too, from those with just $20 to those with millions.
I have followed the Robinhood Investor Index for some time and have noticed that it doesn't change much. Most of the popular names one might expect, like those benefiting from the AI revolution, tend to find their way into the top five or 10 of the index and shuffle around.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SPCX -3.33%) is the newest entrant, now clocking in at No. 4 (as of Aug. 11).
This isn't a big surprise, given SpaceX's incredible popularity. Not only is the company run by Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, who has a cult-like following among investors, but it has also been popular for a decade and just completed the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever.
SpaceX raised nearly $86 billion and had its IPO oversubscribed, so the popularity was there from the jump. The stock now has a $1.88 trillion valuation, making it one of the largest companies by market cap.
NASDAQ: SPCX
Key Data Points
SpaceX fascinates investors for several reasons. It has played a key role in reviving interest in space exploration and missions to the moon by enabling the creation of reusable rockets.
It owns Starlink, its low-Earth-orbit satellite internet network that can bring high-speed internet to places on Earth without reliable internet infrastructure. Starlink now has roughly 12 million subscribers.
Finally, SpaceX acquired Musk's other company, xAI, earlier this year, which owns a smorgasbord of potential AI businesses. This includes the social platform X, Grok Intelligence, massive data center facilities, and a potential future Terafab facility.
As many have noted, SpaceX's regulatory filings read like a science fiction novel, discussing topics such as data centers in space and asteroid mining. Included in Musk's long-term incentive pay package are rewards for establishing a colony on Mars with at least 1 million people.
Are retail investors right about SpaceX?
It's clear that retail investors have high conviction in SpaceX, and it wouldn't surprise me to see SpaceX eventually reach the No. 1 spot in the Robinhood Investor Index.
The company is complex. Right now, Starlink is definitely a strong, profitable business with good margins. But the long-term bet at this valuation is clearly on the AI division, which SpaceX itself has said has a total addressable market (TAM) of $26.5 trillion.
Embedded in these assumptions is SpaceX's ability to launch data centers into space, quickly capture a significant amount of AI compute, and create AI enterprise applications that could even replicate human workflows.
Furthermore, all of these activities depend on SpaceX making its fully reusable, super-heavy-lift Starship rocket operational to the point where it can make weekly and even daily trips into space, operating more like a commercial airline.
If SpaceX accomplishes even a fraction of its ambitions, the stock would likely be worth multiples of its current value. However, nobody truly knows what will happen, so it's all still a big bet. Failure to bring some of Musk's ambitions to fruition could also trigger a major sell-off.
That's why I continue to think a smaller, more speculative position in the stock is best right now.
