Retail investors had on of their best years

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“Retail is just getting smarter, and they’re getting hardened to the market,” said Mark Malek, investing chief at Siebert Financial. In other words: These investors “really are growing up.”

Individual traders bought the dip at a faster clip during market drawdowns early in the year, according to JPMorgan quant analyst Arun Jain, who called it a “successful year” for this group. It was an effective strategy: 2025 is shaping up to be the second-best year since at least the early 1990s for dip-buying, per data from Bespoke Investment Group data published this month.

From May onward, JPMorgan said, these investors shifted their focus from single stocks to ETFs. The group particularly dove into the SPDR Gold Shares (GLD)
fund, with JPMorgan finding 2025 inflows topped the last five years combined. The gold-focused ETF has seen a record-setting surge of more than 65% this year amid the precious metal’s rise to all-time highs.

The result: retail investors’ single-stock portfolios have seen stronger profit-to-loss ratios than baskets tied to artificial intelligence and software run by JPMorgan, according to data from the bank released earlier this month. Everyday investors’ exchange-traded fund holdings had much higher profit rates than the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY)
and Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ)
, the firm found.

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