What started as a pandemic lockdown pastime has become a force Wall Street can’t ignore. Deep in Reddit’s discussion boards and social media forums, retail investors are finding stock picks that beat major Wall Street firms charging huge fees and running elite algorithms. Some are speculative meme stocks, but dismissing all of them is a mistake. The data proves it. JPMorgan found that retail flows hit fresh records in 2025, up about 60% year over year, CNBC reported.
A peer-reviewed study titled “Democratisation of Retail Trading” analyzed 1.6 million posts from Reddit’s WallStreetBets community spanning from January 2018 to March 2022. The researchers compared these investment recommendations to over 16,000 recommendations made by analysts at the top 20 largest investment banks in the world. The study found that WallStreetBets’ average investment returns actually compete with and outperform the best investment banks in certain cases. The researchers looked specifically at S&P 500 stocks and identified the top 15% of best-performing companies during that time period. They discovered that WallStreetBets detected 27 of the 56 top-performing stocks, which ranked it competitively against major institutions despite being a free community.
For this article, we picked growth stocks that social media (Reddit, X, Stocktwist) is excited about. We chose them based on how frequently and seriously they were mentioned, and paid special attention to the reasons retail investors are giving for their 10x potential. With each stock, we have also mentioned its hedge fund sentiment.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Insider Monkey’s quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 599.2% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 372 percentage points (see more details here).
Photo by Adam Nowakowski on Unsplash
10. Sellas Life Sciences (NASDAQ:SLS)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 13
Sellas Life Sciences (NASDAQ:SLS) is one of the top favorite stocks social media believes can 10x. It is a biotech company developing a cancer immunotherapy drug called GPS — a treatment that works by training a patient’s own immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells, rather than using traditional chemotherapy. Sellas Life Sciences (NASDAQ:SLS) is currently testing GPS on acute myeloid leukemia, one of the most aggressive and deadly forms of blood cancer, in a large clinical trial called the REGAL trial.
Social media users call this one of the most compelling trial setups they have ever seen. Reddit is excited about this stock because it is not a traditional drug bet — it is a data science and modeling bet. One social media commenter holding 168,000 shares and 2,500 deep-in-the-money call options described it as “the strongest canon of due diligence I’ve ever found for a stock.”
Sellas Life Sciences’ (NASDAQ:SLS) growth catalyst is simple — a successful trial readout would almost certainly trigger a buyout from a major pharmaceutical company. Bulls believe the drug could become a standard of care for leukemia and potentially expand to other cancers, making it an extremely valuable acquisition target. Bears argue that 10x from the current price of around $8-9 is unrealistic, with most sober estimates pointing to a 3-5x return on a buyout rather than a moonshot.
9. Infleqtion Inc (NYSE:INFQ)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 24
Social media believes Infleqtion Inc (NYSE:INFQ) has the potential to 10x in the long term. Infleqtion is a quantum technology company that makes and sells quantum computers, quantum sensors, and quantum software. Its customers include the US Department of Defense, the US Navy, NASA, the UK government, and Nvidia. Its moat is its proprietary neutral-atom platform, which underpins both its computing and sensing products across defense, aerospace, and national security applications.
Infleqtion Inc (NYSE:INFQ) already sells equipment to the US military and has received a $100 million equity investment from the US government. Social media also frequently cites its Nvidia partnership as a key credibility signal.
What makes Infleqtion stand out among competitors is its neutral-atom technology. Infleqtion Inc (NYSE:INFQ) uses lasers to capture and hold atoms — specifically cesium or rubidium — in a restricted space, manipulating them as qubits. Unlike IonQ, which uses electrically charged ions, Infleqtion uses uncharged natural atoms. Because these atoms are identical by nature, they deliver higher fidelity and accuracy than synthetic alternatives. The tradeoff is speed — neutral atoms are slower than superconducting qubits used by IBM and Rigetti — but Infleqtion Inc (NYSE:INFQ) makes up for it with superior accuracy and the ability to operate at room temperature.
Hedge Fund Resource Center