👊 The retail trading revolution

Retail traders are rewriting the rules of the market. While their influence on “meme” stocks like GME and AMC, and more recently the DORK stocks, have forced institutions to take them more seriously, their impact isn’t strictly limited to what’s trending on r/WallStreetBets. Retail now accounts for about 20% of total trading volume, compared with less than 15% for hedge funds. 

In the original GameStop frenzy, traders sought out a stock that was heavily shorted by hedge funds, but in an about-face, now they’re forcing institutional investors into trading their favorite stocks. This week, for example, Goldman Sachs strategist John Marshall told clients to buy large-cap stocks with elevated retail activity, like Palantir Technologies and Advanced Micro Devices. 

Retail traders are also playing a key role in fueling a stock’s price movement at a time when every investor’s eyes are on them: quarterly earnings.

• Analysts from JPMorgan have identified the substantial retail activity that’s associated with massive earnings reactions (as shown in this chart).

• But it’s not always the case that retail is contributing to (or creating) the obvious trend in response to earnings. Sometimes the crowd is buying the dip after a stock nose-dives post-earnings.

• Analysts at Bespoke Investment Group noted that more and more of a stock’s overall performance is driven by immediate reactions to earnings, as stocks average a one-day absolute share price change of 7% after reporting.

The Takeaway

As institutional investors shift their strategies in response to retail traders and retail traders drive off-the-charts volatility with their earnings plays, it’s become less clear who is a sheep and who is the shepherd in traders’ herd mentality. Retail traders are now such a market-moving force that institutional investors are chasing their trades, flipping the narrative. 

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Look, we’ve spent a lot of time in Las Vegas, and summer’s over 100-degree-in-the-shade days don’t make it our favorite time to visit, but something more than a summer slump is happening. Data shows the number of visitors has dropped every single month in 2025, relative to 2024, with June seeing 11% fewer tourists compared to the same time a year before. 

Vegas has never seen this level of slowdown, with the exception of the pandemic. There are a few reasons some people are putting their money on, such as:

• Tariffs, inflation, and economic uncertainty are holding back trips.

• Vegas is just too darn expensive now, with everything from parking to food costing high-roller bucks.

But we’re betting all our chips on a third option: why go to Sin City when you can gamble while sitting on your couch?

Indeed, the massive rise of online sports betting, which we’ve charted here, shows Americans’ appetite for gambling hasn’t dampened one bit, with a peak of $16.8 billion bet in a single month this year. 

And if you’re a fan of unlikely parlays and prop bets, well, prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket let you wager on who will be the next pope or if Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will get engaged. Americans are rushing into those platforms too, with a staggering amount wagered on last year’s US presidential election. 

The Takeaway

It’s not game over for Vegas, where companies like Wynn and MGM are taking a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach with WynnBET and BetMGM, but those efforts face challenges, too. Meanwhile, we think there’s another way that Americans are getting a bit more adventurous with their money: derivatives, especially a kind of option called 0DTE, which we dive into here.

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How much do analysts love Amazon’s grocery gamble? Let us count the ways:

1. Bank of America’s Justin Post said it was a “$90bn revenue opportunity.”

2. Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney predicts it will increase “stickiness and customer lifetime value.”

3. Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak called groceries “the most important (and largest) remaining bucket of offline US consumer spend.”

4. JPMorgan’s Doug Anmuth thinks Amazon could raise the price of Prime by $20.

Why Ives called it the “shot heard round the warehouse”

• Intel rallied late in the day after a report emerged that the US may take a stake in the chipmaker

• TeraWulf jumped almost 60% on news of AI hosting deals and Alphabet’s 8% stake in the bitcoin mining company

• Bumble dropped after big shareholder Blackstone and founder Wolfe Herd moved to sell a huge chunk of the company

• CoreWeave plunged even further ahead of the company’s post-IPO lockup expiry

• After hitting a new all-time high on Wednesday night, bitcoin sank on a hot PPI report and some discouraging words from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent