Huang Jiarui knew she’d beaten the odds when she secured 1,000 shares in CXMT’s IPO, one of China’s leading memory-chip makers and a key player in the country’s push to build its own chip industry. The allotment rate was just 0.47%.

On July 27, CXMT debuted on Shanghai’s STAR Market, the exchange’s Nasdaq-style board for tech companies. Its shares opened at 49.5 yuan ($6.93) — nearly six times the 8.66-yuan offer price. Huang sold immediately.

“Short-term moves are driven by emotion and money flow,” the 28-year-old told Sixth Tone. “The profits were already good, so I’ll wait for the price to fall back before buying again.”

Huang, who works in the financial industry in the country’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen, has long favored tech stocks, from Chinese battery makers to Nvidia and Tesla. In April, she began shifting more attention back to China, drawn by advances in chips, AI, and manufacturing. “In tech right now, it’s either China or the U.S.,” she said.

Asked how much those considerations influence her decisions, Huang puts the combined weight of “patriotism” and “confidence” in China at about 30%. She says they also make her willing to pay a premium for Chinese tech even when valuations look stretched.

Even so, about 80% of Huang’s portfolio remains in U.S. tech, with the remaining 20% evenly split between China and South Korea. “China’s tech sector has only been gaining ground since 2024,” she said. “The U.S., by contrast, has three decades of history to look back on.”

That mix of enthusiasm and caution is increasingly visible among a growing cohort of younger Chinese retail investors entering the market.

Lu Xiaomeng, an associate professor of finance at Shanghai’s Fudan University, said older investors tended to get information from financial news and account managers. Younger investors now open their phones to a stream of market data, influencers’ opinions, and AI analysis.

Investors born in the 1990s and 2000s accounted for more than 45% of the 27.44 million new A-share accounts opened in 2025, according to Shanghai Stock Exchange data. Separate research by Ping An Securities and the Hurun Research Institute found that investors under 30 made up about 30% of all investors, roughly double their share before September 2024.

Lu said companies such as CXMT can appeal to younger investors for reasons beyond returns. Buying shares in chipmakers and other hard-tech companies, she said, can also be a way to back industries they see as important to China’s development.

“The capital market can carry ideals,” Lu said, “but in the end, price is what counts.”

Crash course

When Huang began trading in college, she saw the stock market as a place to test what she was learning as a finance major. She quickly found that textbook models offered only so much help once real money was involved.

“Technical indicators such as moving averages and mean reversion can be helpful,” she said. “But in the end, it’s often instinct and psychological resilience that really count.”

In February, Huang bought a leveraged Nasdaq-100 exchange-traded fund (ETF) designed to magnify the index’s daily gains and losses threefold. She held on as it fell in March and, by May, had made more than $20,000. Her biggest loss came from a Hong Kong-listed AI concept stock, where she lost more than HK$40,000 ($5,100).

Over time, Huang became less convinced that active trading could consistently give her an edge. She said whatever advantage she gained over passive investing did not seem large enough to justify the time and effort she was putting in.

She still follows the market closely. Huang swaps financial news and stock ideas with her parents in a family group chat, follows financial influencers, and joins online trading groups. She also treats the mood in those groups as a signal in itself. “When everyone is excited, it’s time to reduce positions,” she said. “And when everyone is in despair, it’s time to add.”

On the popular lifestyle app Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, the topic “My Stock Trading Diary” has drawn nearly 3.9 billion views and over 37 million discussions. Users post about wins and losses, exchange lessons from trades, and sometimes frame investing as something larger than making money.

Some posts frame trading as a way to improve their financial circumstances; others treat it almost as a form of self-discipline. One user wrote that trading had not made him rich, but had made him want less and pay more attention to geopolitics and the chip industry.

Losses are documented just as openly. One investor who said he had lost 600,000 yuan traced his progression from denial at 150,000 yuan down, to desperation at 250,000, to delusion at 500,000, and finally resignation at zero: “Oh well, waking up to nothing.”

Shi Donghui, a finance professor at Fudan University, said the shift online has lowered the barriers to trading: investors can open accounts, check prices, find information, and place trades from their phones.

“This change has directly pushed up trading frequency,” he said. “Market correlation has increased, and short-term news can easily sway young people’s trading decisions.”

Lower barriers have also brought less experienced investors into the market, Shi said, including university students with little financial training. Easier access to information and trading, he argued, does not necessarily lead to better investment decisions.

“Big data’s targeted recommendations make it easier to create information bubbles,” Shi said. “Young people can easily be trapped by a single point of view.”

Zhang Yixuan began trading in 2019, just after turning 18. A personal finance documentary first persuaded her to start managing her money early. She began with funds, then opened a stock account after growing frustrated with the delays involved in buying and selling them.

“At the time, I had no strategy and was buying almost randomly,” Zhang said. One stock she picked was later delisted after being flagged as high risk.

She never studied a formal trading method, instead piecing together what she knows from finance books, documentaries, and videos on streaming platform Bilibili. Trading now takes up about four hours of her workday, and stocks account for roughly 60% of her liquid assets.

Unlike Huang, Zhang’s money is concentrated in non-ferrous metals and power utilities rather than domestic tech.

On July 29, after the STAR 50 — an index tracking major companies on Shanghai’s tech-focused STAR Market — had fallen sharply, she began buying an ETF that tracks it. She bought in several batches and sold around July 31 as soon as the position turned profitable. Because she does not know the tech sector well, she said, she kept the position small.

“If there’s a chance to make money, I take it,” she said. “It has nothing to do with being optimistic about the sector.”

Shi said younger investors can amplify short-term moves in fashionable sectors but are unlikely to change the market’s longer-term cycles. Previous booms in solar, liquor, and electric vehicles followed much the same pattern, he said. Sustained gains ultimately need to be supported by company earnings.

Zhang has no regular circle of trading friends and rarely discusses investment ideas with others. She follows information across several online platforms but is wary of simply following influencers.

“It’s your own money,” she said. “In the end, you have to decide for yourself.”

Editor: Apurva.

(Header image: Visuals from VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)