These are the top 10 companies Kiwis have invested in this year. Here’s why it’s worrying
Saturday, 25 October 2025
When we walk into a store, we tend to buy the brands we know and trust. There’s a reason the swoosh of Nike and the three stripes of Adidas adorn the feet of so many people across the world.
That approach is fine when it comes to consumer purchases, but we’re now seeing a similar tendency take hold in investment behaviour. And this will affect your future wealth.
The list of the ten companies Kiwis have invested in the most on the Sharesies platform over the course of 2025 reads like a veritable summary of companies most likely to feature during a chat around the barbecue.
Air New Zealand, Tesla, Apple, Rocket Lab, Spark and Microsoft all crack into the top ten, serving as a stark reminder investment is often driven by what we’re most likely to see in the media, online forums and across social channels, and what we’re most likely to use in our personal lives.
To formulate its list, Sharesies looks at the percentage each investment represents in investor portfolios and then uses this to determine the most popular investments across the community of more than 800,000 investors.
At a time when the US market is fizzing with AI hype, how have the most popular picks by New Zealand retail investors fared?
The simple answer is mixed. Here’s a rundown of stock performance year-to-date at the time of writing:
- Air New Zealand (up 1.7%)
NVIDIA (up 31.7%)
Tesla (up 18.4%)
Rocket Lab (up 154.7%)
Apple (Up 6.5%)
Fonterra Shareholders' Fund (up 62.1%)
Microsoft (up 24.4%)
Spark New Zealand (down 17.8%)
Auckland International Airport (down 3.5%)
- Infratil (down 0.9%)
Sharesies co-CEO Sonya Williams tells me the list of the 50 most-owned companies on the platform has stayed relatively stable over the past 12 months, the only changes coming in terms of rankings of one or two firms.
According to Williams, this shows investors are holding the line and sticking with a long-term view, despite the level of uncertainty we’re seeing due to US tariffs and geo-political uncertainty.
This may be true, but the list also paints a worrying picture about how narrow our decision-making can be when it comes to the companies we choose to invest in.
Are we missing something?
In a piece from 2011, the poet Dylan Garrity wrote: “The spotlight isn’t about the light, it’s about how it makes everything around it dark.” This applies to the stage, but it’s equally applicable when it comes to what we choose to focus on when making investments as part of any wealth generation plan.
Looking at this list, CMC Markets managing director Chris Smith tells me “it’s quite shocking to see no ASX-listed stock in the most popular stocks,” considering the number of success stories we’ve seen across the Tasman.
He says Australia has 2,000 listed companies while the United States offers more than 3000, some of which offer strong growth opportunities.
“Investing locally can almost be lazy and detrimental to portfolio performance, with better revenue and profit growth stories overseas,” he says.
By putting the spotlight on a few companies we may see in online discussions, we could be doing a massive disservice to our portfolios.
“There is a lot of local focus [on this list], which is good for the businesses but less than ideal for investment returns,” says Smith.
“Outside of Rocket Lab's amazing growth, New Zealand has been very slow compared to our International counterparts or even Australia.”
Beyond the United States and Australia, investors could also be tapping into the European market, which offers in excess of 1800 stocks (although not all platforms offer access to the European market).
The point here is it might pay to broaden your view beyond the small list of companies we happen to see breathlessly covered in the columns of financial rags.
Invest in what you know
Legendary investor Peter Lynch famously encouraged investors to “only buy what you know”.
It’s an adage widely used to justify investments in companies like Tesla or Apple. However, just because you have one of Elon Musk’s cars parked in your garage or have an iPhone in your pocket, it doesn’t necessarily mean you understand the intricacies or risks in involved in investing in these businesses.
When Lynch said “buy what you know” what he actually meant was taking the time to understand the fundamentals of a business before buying in.
Your love for a company's product has little do with the critical financial metrics like price-to-earning ration, debt load, free cash flow or its competitive moat against emerging rivals.
Take the example of Tesla, which has a price-to-earnings ratio of 255. This means investors are essentially paying $255 for every dollar of profit that Tesla makes. Baked into the value of the company is the expectation that Tesla will grow exponentially in the coming years, making the share price incredibly vulnerable to cratering in response to a missed earnings target or a readjusted profit forecast. And yes, many people have tried to bet against Musk in the past and lost, but those numbers still offer a stark reminder of what you’re buying.
To put this into context, the price-to-earnings ratio for NVIDIA, another growth business, is only 50.4.
However, Smith is quick to remind me that NVIDIA’s price-to-earnings ratio was 147 in 2023, showing how quickly things can change once a company starts delivering in line with expectations. The question now is whether Tesla will deliver in line with those expecations or miss the mark entirely?
It’s all in your head
Professional director and board advisor Kevin Jenkins tells me much of our decision-making as retail investors comes down to the shortcut in our thinking known as the familiarity bias.
Jenkins says people naturally prefer the things they’re most likely to recognise. It provides a sense of confidence, even if this isn’t based on any analysis of a company’s finances.
“We see certain companies mentioned in the papers all the time and they become familiar to us,” says Jenkins, pointing out that this can lead to us believing we know more about these businesses than we actually do.
As with any bias of this nature, it causes us to make an emotional decision (buying something you like) and then justifying it afterwards (I only bought it because of the quality).
The reality is most retail investors have full-time jobs and do not have the time to investigate the financials of any company forensically.
As Pie Funds chief client James Paterson told me earlier this week: “We invest in a range of different companies around the world that a lot of people would never have heard of. Unless you're researching and unless you have the capability, the skill set and the time… it will be difficult to look into these companies and opportunities by yourself.”
It’s fantastic more New Zealanders are exploring investing via the myriad platforms available today, but as our relationship with investing matures, so too should our scrutiny of the companies we choose to invest in.
Just because a company is famous doesn’t automatically mean it deserves your hard-earned cash.