SNAP’s IPO has dominated financial news for the past month. After the stock gained 45% on its first trading day, bloggers called it “dumb money,” and not a single Wall Street analyst gave it a buy rating until today. In this post, we compare our transaction data for three social media giants: here’s our take on FB vs TWTR vs SNAP.

Not So Millennial:

According to the headlines, SNAP investors are a bunch of college-aged power-users buying their first stock ever. Our data points to a more diverse group of investors: our average $SNAP order size was over $10,000, which was slightly higher than the average order for TWTR. A fair share of young people invested in SNAP, but given the volume and quantity of large retail orders, it looks like Gen-Xers and Boomers are buying shares as well.

Fear of Missing Out

What’s more interesting is where people are trading these stocks. A large portion of our trade data comes from from social trading communities like StockTwits, where investors can share predictions on a stock’s direction. The $SNAP IPO generated huge buzz on these networks, with a steady stream of speculators sharing their opinions and price targets for the company.

It looks like all the buzz influenced some investors to join the party and buy in. Investors were twice as likely to buy SNAP from a social investing community when compared to FB and TWTR. Sounds like people in the forums are buying $SNAP because, well, everyone is doing it.

Trading the Headlines

Though everyone was talking about SNAP last week, most financial commentators were talking SMACK. Investors were much less likely to invest in SNAP from a news website; they were 10 times as likely to buy FB and 3 times as likely to buy TWTR when reading the financial news. If you take a look at the headlines, you can see why:

 (Forbes)

Is Snapchat IPO the Good Kind of Crazy? (Bloomberg)

SNAP is Clown Car 2.0 (Fortune)

The Complete Bearish Case Against Investing in SNAP (Business Insider)

So, if you’re reading the grim headlines in the news, you’re probably not investing in Snapchat without doing more research elsewhere.

In the weeks since SNAP’s IPO, we’ve been surprised by large order sizes of the supposedly “millennial” stock, the large influence of social platforms, and the small number of news-related transactions.