BAM Circus Festival Takes Place In Milan

French acrobat Olivier Mathieu mimics recent price action in crypto (Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images)

it’s so over

Retail traders are “skipping the dips” to dash for cash and bet against tech stocks

The speculative fever that dominated markets for much of 2025 looks to have broken.

13h

Amid recent market turbulence, retail traders are “skipping the dips, selling into rallies, and positioning more defensively,” writes JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain.

Retail purchases in March were roughly cut in half from January and down 40% from February, per JPMorgan.

And still those headline stats understate how cautious the cohort has been of late.

For instance, two products that the retail community stampeded into on Tuesday and Wednesday were the ProShares UltraPro Short QQQ ETF (3x leveraged short the Nasdaq 100) and the iShares 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF (cash, more or less), according to Jain.

In single stocks, Tesla, Nvidia, and Microsoft continue to be bought, but tech more broadly is being sold, with retail positioning in the sector “at its most negative level in six months,” Jain wrote. In particular, Micron and Sandisk have been dumped across the past week on concerns over Google’s TurboQuant algorithm.

Jain’s spotlighting of the newfound risk aversion among retail investors comes roughly a week after Vanda Research said that retail traders had a session in which they sold single stocks, on net, for the first time since November 2023.

Zooming out, the speculative fever that dominated price action for much of 2025 looks to have broken. Call volumes traded across US exchanges (which we highlighted as a key chart to watch for 2026) peaked in October.

That’s also when the Invesco QQQ Trust, Nvidia, bitcoin, quantum computing stocks, and Goldman Sachs’ basket of stocks beloved by retail traders hit all-time closing (or 52-week) highs. (Palantir peaked in early November.)

It will come as absolutely no surprise that another name that reached its zenith along with speculative stocks and bitcoin, the ultimate no-fundamentals asset, is Robinhood Markets, a brokerage that’s become synonymous with retail activity.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

The put/call ratio suggests bearish activity is now dominant, a rarity over the past six months.

Tasha Matsumoto

Stocks eke out gains on hopes for a path forward for reopening the Strait of Hormuz

Stocks rebounded on news that Iran is drafting a protocol with Oman to “monitor transit” through the crucial Strait of Hormuz.

Matt Phillips8h

AI server cluster maker Penguin Solutions takes flight

Small-cap AI server cluster maker Penguin Solutions surged Thursday after posting better-than-expected Q2 revenue and profit numbers Wednesday after the close, along with an increase in full-year sales and profit guidance.

The company, which was known as Smart Global Holdings until July 2024, has positioned itself as a provider of “end-to-end AI infrastructure solutions.”

Its Advanced Computing division designs and sells computers, cabling, and cooling systems, the server racks and clusters of racks AI data centers need. Its other main division sells flash and DRAM memory products.

It’s a pretty small company, with a fully diluted market cap of just over $1 billion and roughly 2,900 employees, according to FactSet.

The stock is volatile. Penguin dove during last year’s tariff tantrum that followed “Liberation Day” in April. Then it turned tail and doubled through early October amid a surge of call options activity, which tends to reflect retail interest. From the October peak, it then plunged by about 50%, before Thursday’s renaissance.

For what it’s worth, call options activity in Penguin is pretty busy today, too — relatively speaking — with roughly 2,625 traded as of 1:15 p.m. ET. That’s the most since early January, when the company last reported quarterly numbers. The average volume over the previous 25 trading sessions is about 325 calls a day, FactSet data shows.

Penguin Solutions Stock Takes Off On AI Bolstered Outlook

The company, which was known as Smart Global Holdings until July 2024, has positioned itself as a provider of “end-to-end AI infrastructure solutions.”

It’s a pretty small company, with a fully diluted market cap of just over $1 billion and roughly 2,900 employees, according to FactSet.

Luke Kawa11h

Momentum returns to optics stocks as the release valve for AI optimism

Potentially imminent end to the war? Buy optics stocks.

Maybe not? Buy optics stocks anyway.

Effectively all the juice left in the AI trade is coming from optics (and memory) stocks. And the latter group is taking a bit of a breather today while the former continues to surge.

Shares of Ciena Corp., Lumentum, and Coherent are building on recent big gains and among the biggest gainers in the S&P 500 near midday, while Applied Optoelectronics is also surging on Thursday.

These companies all provide solutions that help information move around in data centers, and thus are key beneficiaries of the aggressive capex plans of hyperscalers. Nvidia has invested $2 billion apiece in Coherent and Lumentum in deals that also include purchase commitments.

Matt Phillips11h

Space stocks rip during a topsy-turvy day for the equity market

Satellite-services-from-space stocks surged Thursday after reports that Amazon is in talks to buy Globalstar, which provides voice and connectivity services from its satellite network. It also can’t hurt that the general mood around space is ebullient, following the successful launch of Artemis II on Thursday.

Planet Labs and ViaSat also soared on the news.

The gains for EchoStar — seen as a backdoor play at pre-IPO SpaceX exposure — and Rocket Lab were more muted, perhaps because a deep-pocketed competitor like Jeff Bezos getting serious about space services could complicate the plans of the two largest commercial space launch companies.

Rocket Lab and SpaceX see launch services as key to their aspirations of being major providers of voice and data services from low-Earth orbit satellites.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the dominant provider of such services, and the early rumors on the company’s planned IPO — expected to be the largest ever — suggest the market is very excited about the prospects for the industry.

Elsewhere in the space stock world, Intuitive Machines — a maker of space infrastructure that provides services to NASA for lunar missions — also rose.

Globalstar surges after FT reports that Amazon is in talks to buy the satellite group

Rocket Lab and SpaceX see launch services as key to their aspirations of being major providers of voice and data services from low-Earth orbit satellites.

Elsewhere in the space stock world, Intuitive Machines — a maker of space infrastructure that provides services to NASA for lunar missions — also rose.

Hyunsoo Rim, David Crowther

Can Sandisk do the double?

12h

The S&P 500 just had its worst quarter in years. Here are the biggest winners and losers.

Sandisk and energy stocks soared while software names sank amid a broad sell-off in tech stocks.

Balancing balls of different sizes on pink seesaws creating equilibrium