Top 10 bought stocks: September 2026

After half a year at the helm, this month has finally seen Nvidia end its reign at the top of Freetrade’s most bought stocks. Instead, August saw Freetrade users go nuts for Alphabet. We’ll explore what's happening with the Google parent, and why users might have decided to pounce now, down below. 

Remember that this list is not meant as investment advice. Instead, it is simply an insight into the most popular stocks on Freetrade right now.

Top traded stocks methodology: The rankings are based on the total executed value of buy orders placed by Freetrade customers from 1 August to 31 August 2026. The figures reflect buy-side activity only and do not account for sales, holding periods, or individual portfolio weightings.

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It’s finally happened. Nvidia has been unseated from the top spot.

And this isn’t a matter of investors falling out of love with Jensen Huang’s chips. The musical chairs is due to a relative acceleration in the amount Freetrade users sank into Alphabet, rather than a particular downward trend for Nvidia. 

So, the question is why Alphabet, and why now?

After all, the share price dipped by around 5% in August. Things are still in the green across the year to date, but there have been a few bumps in the road recently. Let’s explore what might have taken Alphabet’s pot off the boil, and why investors might still be keen.

Gemini men

It’s easy, and not entirely erroneous, to paint the share price sickness Alphabet has suffered from lately with the broad brush of anxiety over AI capex, but there is a little more depth to the story than that. 

The scale of spend is pretty eye-popping, with projections ramped up to $195bn to $205bn across FY2026 according to Alphabet’s Q2 earnings. 

Against this backdrop, Alphabet might also be coming down with a case of brain drain, particularly in its AI workforce and DeepMind research laboratory. Some notable senior and experienced staff have been poached by rivals, with Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer off to OpenAI and Nobel-winning AlphaFold researcher John Jumper jumping ship for Anthropic. 

Others are starting projects of their own, including star computer science and AI dev duo Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, who have both been at the Silicon Valley giant since 1999 before stepping away this summer to co-found Discovery Loop with fellow Google DeepMind alumni Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals.

To cap it all off, Nobel Prize-winning (yes, another one) AI boffin Demis Hassabis is stepping away from hands-on control, transitioning from CEO of Google DeepMind to its chair and taking on the chief scientist role at Alphabet.

Now, unless you are big into cutting-edge tech, these names might not exactly leap off the page, but they are some of the biggest cheeses in the AI fromagerie. Even if they weren’t, this level of upheaval might create concern about Alphabet’s ability to deliver competitive AI innovations.

That brings us to Gemini. The next iteration of Google’s AI ecosystem, Gemini 3.5 Pro, was promised “next month” way back in May. Here we are in September and DeepMind’s homepage still says the tech is “coming soon” amid reports that the under-construction model just isn’t powerful enough. 

At this rate, maybe we’ll even see Gemini 4 before Gemini 3.5 Pro.

That’s not to say we’ve seen naught but tumbleweed, as new versions of Gemini’s Flash model have been shot out on a near-monthly basis. But Flash aims to hit a particularly attractive balance of speed, performance and low cost, rather than the problem-solving firepower of higher-end frontier models like Pro. 

In the race to build the most capable kit, Alphabet seems to be lagging behind the very same companies that are coaxing away its staff. 

Whether staff turnover has exacerbated or caused development issues, or even been the result of internal frustration at the lack of progress, is hard to know. But shedding so much top-tier talent as you struggle to ship as you struggle to ship a flagship product is not a great look.

I’m feeling lucky

Freetrade investors don’t appear to have been deterred, and are instead taking advantage of the ongoing share price lull to load up at a potential discount. 

After all, while some high-profile AI personnel might have headed for the door, Alphabet’s AI credentials appear bolstered by its latest earnings update. 

Let’s start with the elephant in the room for AI’s heavyweights: translating spend into revenue. Alphabet is arguably one of the few companies achieving this, as Enterprise AI Solutions and enterprise AI Infrastructure drove its 82% YoY increase in Q2 Cloud revenue. 

Daily active users of Gemini had reached 950m, triple the level achieved one year prior, and the business claimed almost 90% of Fortune 100 companies were signed up to its enterprise model. 

AI infrastructure gains are far from totally dependent on Gemini’s success as a frontier model either, as the customers renting computing capacity to run AI workloads could well use Anthropic's Claude, open-source models or even customers' own models.

So maybe, AI commercialisation is going just fine even as apparent issues at DeepMind compromise its newest builds. 

It’s also worth noting that, beyond the AI growth opportunity, Alphabet’s vast wider business looks to be yomping along at pace. Total Google Services revenues jumped by 15% YoY to $94.5bn as Search revenues grew by 17%, as Alphabet said AI features had actually caused an incremental increase in queries, while subscriptions rose by 15%. 

Remember there had been concerns that the proliferation of LLMs would kill search engines off, so Alphabet’s considerable revenue growth here looks particularly encouraging. 

It may even be the case that Alphabet doesn’t need to win the race to build the most powerful frontier model. 

Effectively integrating fast-paced tailored responses and assistance across Search, YouTube, Maps, News, Docs, Gmail, and the company's vast array of other applications is no mean feat, and may be enough of a differentiator to keep the business at the forefront of enterprise and personal tech. 

After all, CEO Sundar Pichai noted in the company’s Q2 earnings call:

“We are seeing tons of demand for our workhorse Gemini Flash series because it hits the sweet spot of performance and cost.”

Maybe Flash is exactly that: The sweet spot. 

Alphabet might not need to triumph in every AI race if it can find a way to engage billions of users and convert this to growing revenues. But with spending well on the way to $200bn this year, investors may still feel entitled to expect better than second place.