Retail Resolve, Credit Form a Stock Bull Case for Troubled Times
- Individual investors pour money into equities at record pace
- Rate stress reflected as valuation problem, not a credit risk
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Fortitude among small-time traders and sanguine credit signals underlie what’s left of the stock bull case as markets skid toward their worst month since the pandemic panic.
While losses are piling up for once-hot trades beloved by the retail crowd from Netflix Inc. to the ARK Innovation ETF, individual investors have bounced back from volatility before, and remain -- potentially -- a brake on drawdowns. Indeed, before Thursday and Friday’s upheaval spurred selling among virtually every investor class, they’d snapped up about $12 billion of equities in the two weeks through Tuesday, the most on record in JPMorgan Chase & Co. data.