Millennials did a terrible job picking stocks in 2017 (AMD, FIT, SNAP, GPRO, F, AAPL, TWTR)

Olivia Harris/Getty

• Millennial investors favored tech and bitcoin in 2017.
• The generation's favorite stocks posted mostly losses.

While some millennials surely spent 2017 swiping through dating apps and posting selfies on social media, an increasing number of them started investing for their futures. The bad news is, they don't seem to be very good at it.

In 2017 Robinhood, the trading app popular with millennials, users tended to buy well-known consumer names. Some of their picks, mainly the big tech companies, did well, but six of the 10 most popular stocks on Robinhood last year ended the year lower than they started.

The 10 most popular stocks on the app and their one-year returns are as follows.

1. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) -3.14%
2. Fitbit (FIT) -25.39%
3. Snap (SNAP) -39.42%
4. GoPro (GPRO) -13.81%
5. Ford (F) +0.32%
6. Apple (AAPL) +47.89%
7. Twitter (TWTR) +48.97%
8. General Electric (GE) -43.51%
9. Chesapeake Energy Corporation (CHK) -40.04%
10. Tesla (TSLA) +49.03%

Tech stocks tended to give millennials the best returns, with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Nvidia, and Tesla resulting in the biggest dollar gains for Robinhood users. Those who invested in AMD, GE and Snap saw some of the biggest losses, the company told Markets Insider in an email.

Users of the Stockpile app, which allows users to buy fractional shares of expensive companies, saw similar trends from its users in 2017. Its top stock was Amazon, followed by Bitcoin Investment Trust, a fund that seeks to track the price of bitcoin.

"We're finding that millennials like to buy stocks of companies they know and whose products and services they use personally, or aspire to use. So Amazon, Snapchat, Facebook, Tesla all make sense." a Stockpile spokesperson told Markets Insider. "As far as Bitcoin, many millennials see this as a growth opportunity created by their generation and something they can get in on early."

Read about the "submarine trend" that is hard to see but is affecting nearly every company you know.

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