Are You Not Entertained!?

I posted this before, but this is one of the biggest reopening question marks for financial markets: What will happen to retail investors? This graph shows the week over week change in Robinhood positions for the 1st half of 2020.

Robinhood grew almost 200% over this 5 month period!

Why? Was it gambling? Nope.

Was it RH users called the bottom? Nope.

The correct answer? People were bored and had nothing else to do.

The big increase in users started when TSA and Restaurant data started crashing. You can see it declines when reopening starts and then picks up again when the protest curfews started.

Basically, people used Robinhood to entertain themselves.

The big question for a lot of these small retail loved stocks: What happens when people have other things to do? My guess is they will be at Disneyland instead of trading.

“We’re Streaking through the Market!!”

(Reference from Old School)

The stock market is not completely random – it’s mean reverting over time. Just to provide it: Here’s the next day avg. return and probability of going up based on the number of consecutive days the market has gone up or down.

You can see the probability the market goes up and the average return almost monotonically declines from the most negative streaks to the most positive streaks.

This is one of the reasons the average investor gets killed. Fear on the low end causes them to sell and miss the rally. FOMO on the high end causes them to buy at the wrong time.

Pay attention to the current streak when you are compelled to buy or sell. If you want to sell after 5 days down, it’s probably a bad time.