Millennials are taking 'big shots' on speculative stocks and selling Whole Foods and Yahoo (AAPL, FB, AMZN, PLUG, SNAP, DRYS, YHOO, VZ, T)

Kinahan is an expert in retail investing. As the chief market strategist at TD, he has a unique window into 7 million brokerage accounts with more than $750 billion in assets.

This piece of the interview was edited for length and clarity.

Greg Hoffman: What are millennial investors doing in their TD Ameritrade brokerage accounts?

JJ Kinahan: der investors went to dividend paying stocks like AT&T and Verizon and they are willing to buy them on the way down too. Why? Because of the 4-5% yields they pay, which is a lot when you consider the low rate environment we are in.

are not going to these stocks. When you are younger, while you want your money to be safe, you know you have a lot of time to recover if something goes wrong. So with millennials, investing is more about capital appreciation.

The two big take aways are number one, no matter what age you are, you want a quality company. Number two, the next level of stocks you want to invest in isn't necessarily yield based.

A lot of millennials took big shots on more speculative stocks such as Plug Power and Dryships. Because you can buy 100 shares and not lose too much money because the share price is so low, but if it really pops, there's a lot of potential for reward.

Also, millennials were buyers and holders of Ford stock in April. It made our top 10. Some people might be surprised by this, thinking Ford is for older investors, but apparently not. Ford was also in the top 10 for older investors.

Hoffman:What about Snap Inc.?

Kinahan: On Snap we saw a lot of interest immediately following the IPO. Now we don't see as much trading in Snap. Millennials seem to be holding Snap stock.

Hoffman: Anything else that really stood out?

Kinahan: Yes. It wasn't what they bought, but what they sold. Millennials are selling Whole Foods and Yahoo, that stood out to me. Whole Foods, we saw a lot of our investors getting out of after the stock recovered in the last month or so following speculation of a buyout. Yahoo, I found very interesting. I think this is a result of the "Googleization" of the internet. People just aren't using Yahoo as much anymore. Millennials are less interested.

Some of the older folks may be using Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance still, but I think younger people don't really ever use Yahoo so they don't want to own the stock.

What's interesting to me about millennials is it doesn't matter what age group you are in. During April three of the top five held stocks were the same for millennials and older generations: Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.