Matt Levine, Columnist

Retail Voters and Insider Traders

Also the new Treasury blueprint, collared shareholders and robot analysts.

October 9, 2017 at 1:36 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

Retail voters.

I confess that people who invest by buying shares of individual stocks, in 2017, are a little mysterious to me. I don't mean hedge-fund managers who pick stocks for their funds, I mean dentists who come home after a long day of dentistry, log into their Fidelity accounts, and look up the price-earnings ratios of a bunch of tech stocks so they can pick one to buy for their personal account. That activity seems to be in long-term decline, as more people put their money in index funds or exchange-traded funds or robo-advisers. This is sometimes described as a rise of passive investing, but it is also just the basic modern economic movement to increased specialization. In the olden days you grew your own wheat and churned your own butter and sewed your own clothes and bought your own stocks, but now you have people or robots to do all of that for you, and you can concentrate on your dentistry.