Retail traders are doing something they haven’t done since June: selling tech stocks. Data complied by JPMorgan strategists showed mom-and-pop investors were net sellers of tech to the tune of about $140 million over the past week. That breaks a two-month long daily buying streak in which retail traders on average bought more than $1 billion per day. The turnaround in retail activity coincides with tech’s recent struggles. Megacap tech giants such as Nvidia , Microsoft , Meta Platforms , Alphabet and Amazon are all down this week. Palantir Technologies , once a retail favorite, has plunged over 13% in that time. Those declines have put pressure on the broader market indexes this week, with the S & P 500 down 0.8%, while the Nasdaq Composite has shed 2.1% in that time. .IXIC 5D mountain Nasdaq 5-day chart “Investors have benefited greatly from the impressive performance of the tech sector, not only so far in 2025, but also over the past several years,” wrote Tom Essaye of The Sevens Report. “But these gains have also stretched the bounds of what most investors would call reasonable valuations in the tech space and recently we’ve seen certain AI-darling stocks trade at extreme valuations.” “The most obvious example of this is Palantir (PLTR), a stock that is the best performer in the S & P 500 YTD but also trades at a quasi-absurd 212X forward earnings,” he said. To be sure, retail traders aren’t completely exiting the stock market. “They prioritized profit taking in single stocks … while buying the dip in broad-based market ETFs,” JPMorgan wrote. Overall, the cohort net purchased around $5 billion in ETFs in the past week while selling $489 million in single stocks. Perhaps this shuffle out of single stocks and into ETFs is fueling another trend seen this week: a rotation into other parts of the market. The iShares Russell 1000 Value ETF (IWD) is up 0.4% this week, while its growth counterpart — the IWF — is down nearly 2%.
Mom-and-pop traders are dumping tech
