Retail traders’ monthly appetite for stocks ascends to fresh record
“The current ‘new year’ momentum has been sustained and has now pushed retail activity to an all-time high on a rolling monthly basis,” according to JPMorgan.
With an insatiable appetite for both single stocks and ETFs to kick off 2026, retails traders have bought themselves into the record books.
“Retail investors continue to set new records this year — reaching an impressive $12.9B this week,” JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain wrote. “This level is comparable to last year’s buy-the-dip episodes (post-DeepSeek, March Momentum Unwind and the V-Shape recovery in April); but unlike those prior episodes, which faded quickly, the current ‘new year’ momentum has been sustained and has now pushed retail activity to an all-time high on a rolling monthly basis.”
Tuesday, when stocks slumped amid tariff and geopolitical tensions, was the third-largest trading day of the past year for retail, per Jain.
An elevated retail presence has unsurprisingly coincided with a strong start to the year for more volatile pockets of the market.
“Improving macroeconomic conditions, firmer growth expectations, and a shift toward more cyclical outcomes have encouraged investors to take on risk,” wrote Dave Mazza, chief executive officer of Roundhill Investments and portfolio manager of the Roundhill Meme Stock ETF. “As confidence has improved, market leadership has broadened beyond mega-cap growth into higher-beta, volatility-sensitive areas.”
In a January 20 email, he flagged Sandisk, Bloom Energy, and Applied Digital as members of the ETF among the chief beneficiaries from “improving price momentum, elevated trading activity, and sustained retail engagement.”
While the current retail footprint in the market has evoked some comparisons to 2021 (well, by me at least), Cboe’s Henry Schwartz, vice president of derivatives market intelligence, pointed out one sign in the options market that there’s less exuberance than in those heady days: the share of single stocks whose calls trade at a higher implied volatility than puts is well shy of its early 2021 peak.
