Many retail investors exited the stock market after 2008, leading to a drop in individual market participation

That changed thanks to GameStop, federal stimulus checks, and strong corporate results in the first quarter of 2021. This chart plots how much retail investors poured into the market each day, reaching records in early 2023.

GameStop stock began a meteoric rise in January 2021, rallying from a low of $2.57 to as high as $438 when Keith Gill helped mobilize retail investors to drive prices higher

Keith Gill was a financial advisor who posted on social media under usernames including "Roaring Kitty." Backing from Chewy founder Ryan Cohen, who became GameStop's CEO, took things up a notch.

How a Reddit thread drove GameStop's stock price up and gutted the pockets of short sellers

In 2021, many hedge funds felt like GameStop was overvalued and began placing short positions. However, users in the "r/WallStreetBets" subreddit felt like the hedge funds were too aggressive in their short positions and rallied together to purchase large amounts of GameStop stock, pushing the stock price up. As the stock price rose, hedge funds began buying back their shares to cover their short positions, which also began pushing the stock price up in what's called a "short squeeze."

Retail investing by the numbers

When average Americans began pouring into the stock market, Wall Street wasn’t sure if its new guests were there to stay. But at the end of 2023, Public confidently declared that retail investors “weren’t going anywhere” after 30 million new individuals began buying and selling stock. Download the report to learn more here.

How COVID-19 brought new investors into the market

With fees removed from the equation and more time at home thanks to pandemic-related lockdowns, Americans who had never bought or sold stocks before started participating in the market. Charles Schwab dubs this cohort “Generation Investor” and notes individuals from all age ranges took part in this phenomenon. Study up here.

Listen to Keith Gill's testimony from the GameStop hearing

"I am not a cat, I am not an institutional investor, nor am I a hedge fund." That's how Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, kicked off his testimony before Congress on the wild trading action in GameStop stock. Lawmakers took notice of the meme stock craze, and the collapse of hedge fund Melvin Capital, opening up an investigation into what exactly moved so much money.

Robinhood's pivot from everyday investors to hyperactive traders

The platform was conceived as a hub for first-time investors looking to get into trading. After criticism in 2021, the company pivoted to focus on more regular, daily traders, among whom the company's CEO has now become a cult hero.

Electronic trading transformed investing, ushering in a new era for retail investors in which average Americans could research stocks online and then use early platforms like StreetSmart and E-Trade to conduct their transactions

In the early 1990s, stock brokerages knew that online trading would be a great equalizer, creating opportunities for more individuals to buy and sell stocks.

Robinhood's mission of democratizing finance included its IPO

In 2021, investing app Robinhood went public—and decided to go about its IPO process differently. Unlike other companies, it opened up its IPO for the general public to purchase right away. A podcast episode explains what made Robinhood's IPO so unique prior to its launch date.

Who is Michael Burry?

Michael Burry is best known for shorting the mortgage bond market in 2007. Before the Great Recession, the legendary investor’s firm took a stake in GameStop and argued the company was being undervalued in 2019. Learn more about Burry’s historical impact on markets here.

Retail investors are getting burned by long/short strategies

In the US, many retail investors lack the SEC-mandated status (a high enough net worth, income, and other factors) to directly invest in hedge funds. The regulator considers hedge funds too risky for the masses. Hedge fund-like strategies have emerged as a workaround, despite potential pitfalls.

Retail investors are not professionals—they invest their own money

For retail investors, the stakes may seem higher and more personal. Critics say that this dynamic means that retail investors are more susceptible to behavioral biases that could lead them to make poor decisions when it comes to buying and selling assets. For instance, fear of missing out could cause a retail investor to buy a stock that is popular but not a financially worthy investment.

Learn how to build a retail investing toolkit

Retail investors may not have the same resources institutional players do, but thanks to the internet, they can access several free tools that provide a leg up. These tools do everything from recommending portfolio allocations to helping investors screen stocks.

Just because a big name company is going public doesn’t guarantee a successful stock

A reporter dove into how highly anticipated IPOs can still be risky, and why retail investors should be wary of investing right away.

Explore a step-by-step guide for getting started as a retail investor

Instead of purchasing individual stocks and bonds, new investors may want to start in funds that track an index—like the S&P 500—or that hold a group of themed stocks.

The Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets is a place to discuss high-risk trading strategies

r/WallStreetBets is a forum (aka a “subreddit”) on the social media platform Reddit that was started in 2012. Later, r/WallStreetBets evolved into a place where unconventional investment approaches were not just tolerated, but planned and celebrated. It’s perhaps most famous for its role in the GameStop saga.

Pop culture sometimes changes the way people invest

After the "Barbie" movie premiered, the number of investors in Barbie parent company Mattel's stock grew more than six times larger on the investment platform Public, according to the platform's recent report. Other cultural trends have affected which stocks investors choose as well.

Look inside a retail investor's portfolio

Online investing platform eToro conducted a survey of retail investors in June 2024. It explored what assets they held and what types of stocks they liked to purchase. The most commonly held asset was cash, with 76% of retail investors holding cash in their portfolios. The next most popular asset was domestic stocks, with 49% of investors.

Charles Schwab kick-starts zero-commission era for retail investors

Throughout history, retail investing was often too expensive for many individuals. That’s because investors owed the cost of the trade as well as the commission and fees due to the broker. Charles Schwab revolutionized the retail investing landscape in 2019 when it announced it would slash all fees on stock trading. This quickly prompted other brokerages to follow suit. Read more in this article.

A short squeeze happens when short sellers increase stock prices by buying shares back quickly

When short sellers realize their positions may be incorrect—usually triggered by increasing share prices—they often try to quickly buy back their shares in order to minimize their total losses. When this happens on a large scale, that buying activity can drastically increase to represent the seemingly high demand for that stock. The result is called a "short squeeze," which refers to short sellers literally being squeezed out of their positions by rising prices.

Retail investors are average joes, while institutional investors often move billions of dollars a day

Retail investors often trade 100 shares at a time, while institutional investors trade 10,000 or more. The biggest difference is that, unlike retail investors, institutional investors are professionals who are trading someone else’s money.

Read how Vanguard's founder used the S&P 500 to revolutionize retail investing

John Bogle, the founder of The Vanguard Group, created a fund that tracked the S&P 500 in 1976. That fund created an unprecedented opportunity for individual retail investors, brought down fees across the board, and popularized the belief that passive, low-cost index fund investments would outperform actively managed portfolios long-term.

ETFs are rising in popularity

While less than half of retail investors hold ETFs in their portfolio, this figure is up dramatically in recent years, and experts forecast continued adoption as more options hit the market and total ETF assets under management continue to grow.

Hear why one short seller thinks short selling is now more important than ever.

Some experts and investors think short selling—a strategy in which investors bet that a stock will drop in value—helps keep the market healthy.

Venture capitalists were once bullish on DTC brands

While a physical store can only hold so many objects, online retailers without the limits of four walls that could sell their products direct-to-consumer could theoretically be great investments. But they didn’t always provide investors with expected returns.

Play a game that reveals if investors with a crystal ball make better trades

The "crystal ball" game reveals how well you would do trading stocks and bonds if you could see the front page of the Wall Street Journal one day in advance.

Retail investors are individuals who trade stock for themselves

Institutional investors, on the other hand, are investing for someone else. There are big differences between the two, one being that institutional investors can be granted certain special treatment (like being able to purchase IPOs right away).

Millions of Americans will be invested in SpaceX because of the fast-tracked process to list SpaceX on the Nasdaq 100, and, subsequently, the index funds that track it.

Meme stocks often have little underlying value but are fueled by crowd funding

"Meme stocks" is a phrase originating in the early 2020s, referring to companies with little underlying value who gain recognition through social media and whose stock price experiences rapid gains.

Why does the stock market matter?

Open any newspaper, turn on your local TV news station, or listen to a daily business radio segment, and you’re bound to hear about how the stock market is performing. Netflix created a 17-minute (free) explainer that dives deep into the nitty-gritty of how we got here.

Read about why bans on short selling are a controversial policy

Generally, short selling is legal, but regulations often restrict short positions when a stock has experienced a sharp price decline (more than 10% in one day). However, negative feedback loops in times of financial crisis have given short selling a bad reputation. The government has temporarily banned short selling during previous market downturns—like The Great Recession of 2008 and the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic—but experts argue whether those bans actually improved market stability or just distorted prices.

Retail investors cannot directly invest in private credit funds—but other financial vehicles can offer exposure to the industry

For example, as some US regulations have loosened in recent years, retail investors have begun to get exposure to the private credit market via ETFs that invest in publicly traded financial vehicles with private credit exposure, such as BDCs.

Retail investors can get exposure to commodities via various financial vehicles

While retail investors likely won't go out and purchase a bushel of commodity wheat to trade, they can get exposure to the commodities market via commodity ETFs sold on traditional stock exchanges like the NYSE and Nasdaq and other financial vehicles. There are benefits to adding commodities to a retail investor portfolio (such as a hedge against inflation and a typically low correlation with more traditional asset prices), experts caution that commodities are usually volatile investments.

While day trading has risen in popularity in recent years, the SEC warns it is a speculative strategy that can cause big losses

A day trader is anyone who buys and sells a stock within the same trading day. They quickly move in and out of the market to try and profit. Some day traders are professionals, while others are retail investors.

See a real-time list of the most shorted stocks in the US

Every two weeks, the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange release the stocks with the most short positions. Some of the companies with the highest short positions as of early 2026 were Hims & Hers and Groupon.

Alternative investments have become more popular since the 2008 financial crisis

When the traditional markets crashed during the 2008 financial crisis, many people saw the value of their traditional investments plummet and began to look into alternatives as a result.

BlackRock says investor demand and improvements in underlying fund technology have supercharged ETF availability in 2025

Investors are likely most familiar with ETFs that invest in an index or other grouping of stocks. However, BlackRock breaks down a wide variety of options, including commodity ETFs, currency ETFs, and bond ETFs.

Crypto ETFs are driving cryptocurrency adoption

In 2024, the SEC approved ETFs that track the price of bitcoin called spot bitcoin ETFs. These funds have since significantly increased investment inflows into cryptocurrency markets.