Robinhood (HOOD) customers piled into tech names like Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), and Nvidia (NVDA) during the recent dip.

Steve Quirk, Robinhood chief brokerage officer, joins Asking for a Trend to break down what's driving retail investor activity.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.

Video Transcript

00:00 Speaker A

You always have, you know, interesting line of sight, of course, Steve, into retail traders. So, maybe just start there, broadly, Steve. You know, the customers on Robin Hood, what interests them right now, what excites them, Steve, what have they been buying?

00:27 Steve

Oh, thanks for having me, and good to see you. It's definitely been an interesting market, uh, in the last month. But, um, we just released our metrics, our monthly metrics, so gives us a good view of, um, what customers have been doing. Um, and what we saw was, uh, one of the best months we've ever had in deposits, so clearly our customers saw opportunities, you know, to, to buy the dips. Um, and our, our equity volumes were something we haven't seen in four years. And our option volumes were also close to all-time highs. And our margin balances have pretty much been holding steady. So, um, you know, it's an opportune time for our customers to step in, um, and some of the names, the most popular names that they like to trade, the Amazons, the Apples, uh, Nvidias that, you know, there was a perception we're going to be really harmed by, um, what was being proposed from a tariff standpoint. Um, they saw, you know, some depreciations of 50%, and, you know, now they're back to previous levels. So, um, from a customer standpoint, I would say, uh, customers really kind of stepped in, and I would say, you know, we've been reading a lot about retail in general, which, you know, has, has sort of stepped in and, uh, been opportunistic. Um, so it's good to see.

02:56 Speaker A

So you mentioned Amazon, Apple, Nvidia. So we have a big tech theme going on, Steve. What, what do you make of that? Did that surprise you in any way?

03:13 Steve

No, I don't think it surprised me because they're some of the most popular names, you know, um, from a retail, uh, trading standpoint. I think the other thing that we saw, and this tends to happen broadly in, in, with retail traders is, when you get extreme moves, and we had some pretty extreme moves, I mean, we're talking about a VIX over 60, and, uh, a depreciation in the overall market of 20 plus percent in a very short period of time, uh, you do see customers, uh, move away from some individual names and move into broad-based ETFs. And, uh, the thesis is, um, they have less conviction about one single name, um, rebounding, and more conviction about the market in general rebounding. So, um, as soon as, as soon as we get less, a less volatile marketplace, and a rally back, you tend to see customers gravitate back into the individual names, and we've seen that.  Related Videos

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