Introducing What Reddit Is Buying: The Crowd's Stock Picks, Frozen and Scored Against the S&P 500

Every few months a thread goes viral on Reddit asking the same question: how did the crowd's stock picks actually do? The answers are always a mess. Someone screenshots a handful of winners, the losers quietly disappear, and nobody wrote down when any of the picks were made, so the numbers mean whatever the poster wants them to mean.

Today we are launching a tracker that answers the question honestly, and then keeps answering it.

What Reddit Is Buying turns the conversation across finance communities on Reddit into a standing portfolio: the tradeable stocks the crowd has turned bullish on, each stamped with the date it first qualified and scored on its return since then against the S&P 500.

It is free, and it lives at app.sentisense.ai/trackers/reddit-picks.

How the portfolio is built

We read public posts across a fixed allowlist of finance subreddits, the markets-and-tickers ones, not the consumer or off-topic communities. For each tradeable company or ETF, we count how many distinct posts mention it over a trailing window and read the sentiment of those mentions. A name enters the portfolio when it is among the most-mentioned that period and sentiment leans bullish rather than hostile. The moment it enters, we freeze its entry date and the closing price on that date, and from then on we track its return against the index.

Two design choices are what separate this from a viral screenshot.

First, it is survivorship-free. Once a name enters, it stays. We cannot quietly drop the names that went on to lose, because dropping losers is exactly how every "look how well the crowd did" post flatters itself into meaninglessness. If the crowd was wrong about a stock, it sits right there in the table.

Second, every row links back to the actual Reddit thread it came from, so you can read what people were saying when the name showed up.

And we are explicit about what the signal is and is not: this is inferred positioning, not stated trades. Mention volume and tone tell you what the crowd is talking about and how it leans. They do not tell you that anyone actually bought. We measure positioning the way a room's mood measures conviction, not the way a brokerage statement measures a position.

What it shows right now

At launch, the portfolio is seeded back to late April, and the equal-weighted roster is beating the S&P 500 by roughly a point and a half. The interesting part is the spread, and we show all of it: SNDK is up about 99 percent since it entered and AMD about 52 percent, while MSTR is down about 32 percent and a cluster of more recent favorites are underwater.

That range is the whole point. The crowd is right about some names and wrong about others, and a frozen, survivorship-free record is the only honest way to see which is which.

To read a row: the headline number is return since entry, recomputed daily, with the entry date sitting next to it because different names entered in different months. The portfolio headline compares the equal-weighted average against the S&P over the same windows, so a single big winner cannot carry the whole thing.

The mirror to the pros

If you have seen our Hedge Fund Reported Returns tracker, this is its mirror image. One records what the professionals reported, net of fees, with a citation on every number. This one records where the crowd's attention pointed, scored the same honest way. Putting the two side by side is its own kind of fun, and we will leave the comparison to you.

What it is not

It is not advice, not a measure of fundamentals, and not a prediction. The roster skews toward large, liquid, heavily discussed names and reflects whatever market regime we are in, so a strong or weak aggregate says as much about the market as about the crowd. Read it as a transparent window into crowd positioning, and nothing more.

It updates roughly monthly as positioning shifts, new names enter with their own frozen entry dates, and the ones already in the book keep accruing. The full methodology, including exactly what we exclude and why, is on our methodology page.