REUTERS Brendan McDermid
NEW YORK MILAN, Jan 27 Reuters -- Retail investors bought a net of $1.66 billion in equities on Wednesday after a hawkish U.S. Federal Reserve outcome triggered wild gyrations on Wall Street, according to data from Vanda Research.
The report said that was the highest figure since a peak on November 30, 2021, when retail investors bought a net of more than $2.2 billion.
According to Vanda, the top five biggest net purchases on Wednesday were Apple AAPL.O the Invesco QQQ exchange-traded fund ETF QQQ.O AMD AMD.O Nvidia NVDA.O and Microsoft MSFT.O Retail investors were net buyers earlier in the week, after having been net sellers on Thursday and Friday of last week, according to JPMorgan analyst Peng Cheng.
On Monday, when the S&P 500 saw its largest swing since March 26, 2020, recovering 4.3 percentage points from its session low to the market close, retail traders were net sellers up to 12: 30 p.m. Cheng said in a client note from late Wednesday. Retail traders turned aggressive buyers back on Monday afternoon and bought $1.3 B between 12: 30 and 4: 00 PM. On Tuesday, they continued to buy at a pace of $250 MM per hour, until the buying flattened in the last hour of the trading day, he said.
A leveraged long ETF linked to Nasdaq stocks, ProShares UltraPro QQQQ.O was net sold by retail traders, while ProShares UltraPro Short QQQQQ.O, shorts Nasdaq-linked stocks, was bought, he added.
Retail investors were net sellers of Netflix, which posted disappointing quarterly financial results, as well as stocks that are often seen as popular retail names, such as Coinbase COIN.O Roblox RBLX.N and Peloton PTON.O he said.