Two weeks ago we observed something stunning: at a time when hedge funds were actively (if quietly) selling stocks, the retail community was buying as if its next cigarette break depended on it. It was buying so much in fact, that the recent retail euphoria surpassed what we had seen back in the post-covid stimmy heyday of 2021 (when Gamestop briefly exploded 20x) as we described in "Retail Euphoria Breaks All Records, Steamrolling Bearish Hedge Funds" in which we said, among other things, that JPM's retail sentiment score reached ~4 on Tuesday, the highest level on record and ~1 pt higher than the peak of the meme mania in 2021.
What is also remarkable is that the latest retail euphoria mostly skipped the Mag7 names such as NVDA, AAPL and TSLA, which after surging in late 2024 had flatlined in recent weeks; instead retail investors zeroed in on such pure momentum names as Carvana, Reddit, Palantir, SuperMicro and Oklo, which exploded higher starting in early January and which had gained in the upper-double, if not triple digits, YTD.
