Small investors are fleeing stocks, big money is buying. Which side got it wrong?
Retail investors sold $265 million worth of stocks in a single day last Thursday, the most since the COVID crash. Large funds bought $6.1 billion that week. A week later, those same retail investors poured $111 million into a single stock in half an hour. Each side is choosing its own strategy. Which one will win?
Key points
Retail investors sold the most stocks in a single day since March 17, 2020, on Thursday, November 5
Large funds bought $6.1 billion worth of U.S. stocks that same week
A week later, retail investors poured $111 million into a single stock in the first thirty minutes
The New York Stock Exchange saw its first such day in 243 sessions, the longest streak in at least 30 years
Four dates before Christmas will decide which side of the trade got it wrong
The week the roles reversed
For a year and a half, a simple rule held on the stock market: when the market fell, retail investors bought, and a few weeks later it turned out they were right. It worked after the tariff shock in April 2025 and with every minor stumble since. Large funds, meanwhile, acted cautiously and watched the rally leave them behind.
Last week, that picture fell apart. The U.S. S&P 500 index lost 2.7%, its biggest drop since April 2025, and on Thursday, November 5, it had its worst day since then. This time, retail investors didn't buy. They sold, for the fourth week in a row. Big money did the opposite: pension funds, asset managers, and, for the first time in a month, hedge funds.
It would be easy to turn this into a story about small investors finally getting scared and running away. But a week later, those same people sent a record sum into Nvidia stock $NVDA in the first thirty minutes of trading, on the day its CEO Jensen Huang resigned. That's not how someone who has left the market behaves.
Drobní investoři tedy prodali "trh" a koupili jednu akcii. Velké peníze udělaly přesný opak. Někdo z těch dvou se musel splést a data o tom, kdo komu akcie prodával, ukážou i to, na které straně obchodu jste v posledních týdnech stáli vy.