A report by Openfolio, a free platform where investors share their portfolio philosophies and contents, shows which industries are the most popular among investors in a certain region.
Openfolio allows users to link their brokerage accounts with the platform, then compare their allocations and performance with users who have a similar profile. The platform only shows percentages of what people own, not dollar amounts or number of shares.
For the report, Openfolio calculated the overall popularity of the top 2,000 stocks and funds owned by users for its baseline, then grouped investments by sector.
David Ma, head of marketing and business development for the platform, said, "For the most part, people invest pretty much the same way; the things that are most popular — Apple's always the most popular." However, he told ThinkAdvisor on Thursday, "Whenever we see what looks like an outlier, a discrepancy or a bias […], or even if it's confirming a stereotype that we haven't been able to quantify before, we try to visualize it and share it back out to our users."
After analyzing the data from the platform, "we realized that every region stereotypically conforms to what industry is based in their home region, which makes a lot of sense, but it's cool to see that quantified," Ma said.
Ma acknowledged that Openfolio users skew a little young; the average age is about 35, he said, but users range from under 25 to over 65. He said about two-thirds are under age 50.
Here are the major sectors and their popularity, compared with the baseline, in four U.S. regions:
Technology
