Retail investors continued to pile into cryptocurrencies and AI infrastructure stocks in October, buying the dip amid weak digital asset performance and bubble fears.

MARA Holdings, previously known as Marathon Digital, pipped the likes of mag seven stocks Nividia and Tesla to be the most traded US-listed equity among UK investors on the Robinhood platform last month.

MARA is a digital asset and cryptocurrency mining company that owns more than 50,000 bitcoin, but has also pivoted towards energy and data centre provision for the growing AI industry. 

On Thursday the firm posted $123million in profit for the third quarter of the year.

Despite the surge in trades of MARA, bitcoin saw token prices fall in October. 

The cryptocurrency is currently trading just over $100,000 per token, down from $114,000 at the start of the October. This alone would have wiped hundreds of millions of dollars from the value of Mara's bitcoin.

Dan Lane, lead analyst at Robinhood UK, said: 'The bitcoin price may have taken a breather in October but that didn't dent appetite for a couple of BTC-adjacent stocks.

'Mara made its first major BTC sale in over a year, shifting half the Bitcoin it mined in September. It marks a move from 'hold at all costs' to more of a crypto treasury strategy, which clearly drew investors' attention.'

Robinhood, which only offers US stocks to UK investors, based its figures on the total value of trades for S&P 1500 and Nasdaq Composite stocks that also have a market cap of over $1billion throughout October.

Also beating Nvidia and Tesla in volume was IREN, an Australia-based bitcoin miner that has likewise repurposed its assets towards providing data centre facilities for the AI market.

The firm, which was the second most traded stock in October, on Friday posted net income of $384.6million in the first quarter of its financial year, swinging from a loss of $51.7million a year ago.

Lane said: 'IREN has pushed into cloud computing - AI data centre contracts in particular - in an effort to boost revenues.

'A $875million raise in October to fund further expansion might be behind appetite for the stock over the month.'

Another bitcoin miner, Cleanspark, was also in the list, with the firm also pushing into the AI infrastructure sector, while datacentre operator Nebius was also heavily traded during October.

Lane said: 'CleanSpark got a boost after announcing plans to build AI data centres as well as mining Bitcoin.

'Dutch AI infrastructure firm, Nebius, launched its AI Cloud 3.0 Aether platform during the month, as well as expanding a $17billion GPU-capacity partnership with Microsoft.'

Despite pervading fears of an AI bubble, both Nvidia and Tesla, were heavily traded during October, as was Chipmaker advanced Micro Devices.

Lane said: 'Despite a premium valuation, NVIDIA continued to attract investors in October as it announced $120billion worth of AI partnership deals and won US approval to ship 500,000 chips per year to the UAE.

'Staying in AI, AMD had a positive month after it confirmed a deal to supply 6 gigawatts of graphics processing units (GPU) to OpenAI, marking one of its largest AI partnerships to date.'

Lane says Tesla saw profits fall during the month, despite record vehicle deliveries in the US.