August top trades: Apple in, Microsoft out and Australians trade close to home

The numbers are out. It’s time to dive in.

While Australian and New Zealand investors are continuing to focus heavily on diversifying with ETFs, their global counterparts are staying stock-heavy. But when we look at the individual shares and stocks getting the most transactional attention, our investors are taking note of much the same things.

So what were the top trades for August 2026?

Taking a bite of the Apple

The big story across the board is Apple (AAPL). Never far from investors’ minds, it made the leap to the second-most traded asset in August, up 7 places for New Zealand investors and 10 for global ones.

Investors were buying the anticipation: John Ternus took the reins as CEO on 1 September. His involvement in delivering new product lines (like the iPad and AirPods), give him the innovation interest of Steve Jobs paired with the business acumen of Tim Cook. With timing so close to the latest iPhone announcement on 10 September, smart investors were betting on big changes finally being delivered by the tech giant. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in coming months and whether the interest in Apple continues - stay tuned!

Two sides of the Micro-

While the proportion of investors trading Microsoft (MSFT) has remained steady over the past couple of months, we saw a big shift to sales in August, most sharply in Australia. After strong revenue growth, this shift to sell may well mean investors are eyeing off the balance sheet as Microsoft’s spending on data centres grows.

And we saw the direct impact of that spending for Micron (MU), one of Microsoft’s major memory and storage hardware suppliers. Micron turned from a heavy net-selling position in July to strong net-buying in August. Nvidia’s strong quarterly results likely helped Micron’s recovery along.

Australians get local

CSL (CSL) and WiseTech (WTC) continued to sell into strength for the second month in a row. Palantir (PLTR) joined the top 20 list with investors cashing out their profits from the company’s August rally.

New Zealanders get smart

New Zealand investors continued to focus on Smart ETFs through August, with the US 500 (USF) winning the buy. Amazon (AMZN) was also a crowd favourite after their Q2 2026 earnings reported revenue topping $200B and AWS growth accelerating to 37%.