4 Retail Trading Trends Observed By TD Ameritrade

Benzinga recently caught up with Nicole Sherrod, TD Ameritrade's managing director of trading, to ask about what trends she's seeing with their retail traders in 2016. Here are four things that jumped out to us.

Millennials Love Chesapeake 

According to Sherrod, Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE: CHK) is the third-most traded stock among millennials. For a generation that's known to favor tech stocks, this traditional energy play is a little bit of an outlier. Chesapeake was only the eighth-most traded stock for Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, and wasn't among the top 10 for seniors. 

"You wouldn't think of Chesapeake being a household name, however there was so much exposure to it in the media," Sherrod said. "I think what they were looking for here was a turnaround."

Everybody Loves Tech: Even Seniors

Sherrod noted that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) are the top three most traded stocks across all generations of TDA customers. 

"What I love seeing is how hot they’re getting with seniors, that was not always the case," said Sherrod. "If you look across all the generations, everyone is embracing tech."

Options Are Getting More Popular

Long considered appropriate for only advanced traders and investors, according to Sherrod, over 40 percent of trades made on a given day on TDA trading platforms are derivative trades. She said a lot of that growth has come from millennials.

"In a lot of cases the millennials are really hungry for more information on how to trade options and how to trade futures because they have smaller portfolios. They just haven't made as much money, and options give them the ability to put less capital at risk."

It's All About Mobile

It shouldn't be a surprise that mobile is growing, but what did surprise us was the numbers.

While only about 8 percent of trades made by seniors are done on mobile, 41 percent of trades made by millennials are.