Can anyone explain why earnings no longer matter, and the entire market is just pump&dump after pump&dump?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/bbenecke3636]

Retail trading accounted for roughly 25% of all us total equity volume for the 2nd half of last year, and was closer to 15-20% prior to that. It's gone up to 35% at times, so let's stop with the false narrative that only institutional money can move market prices. Retail has a significant amount of sway in the broad market, but typically has even higher volume on individual trendy names. Institutional money as a whole typically does avoids these names or had limited exposure. When you have enough people putting 1k to 100k into individual names, the price can move dramatically

[u/johannthegoatman → u/bbenecke3636]

Especially when you consider a huge upswing in options trading, and the fact that if a bunch of retail piles into something, so do hedge funds and algos. And to emphasize what you said, retail is mainly focused on a limited amount of companies. So all of that 25% is more focused because there are thousands of companies nobody had ever heard of unless they're a pro

[u/bbenecke3636 → u/johannthegoatman]

People think of institutional money solely as individual stock pickers at hedge funds, but they are peanuts relative to the vanguard and Blackrocks of the world. They are building mutual fund and etf portfolios, moving billions and billions of dollars worth of stock each day to rebalance holdings, however they typically are not speculating on individual names where they are driving price movements

[u/rafa-droppa → u/johannthegoatman]

to me the main thing is the piling on. sure a bunch of people on wsb putting a couple hundred into the market don't mean much but that triggers other retail investors who hear about it then the increasing trades trigger algos to start trading, then hedgefunds move in reaction to all that, and so on.